The Adaptation Industry

Simone Murray’s book makes good on its promise to materialize

adaptation studies. Murray frees the study of adaptation from its most
persistent and constraining orthodoxies: the reliance on text-based
analysis, the preoccupation with issues of fidelity, the privileging of
individual over institutional agency. The Adaptation Industry gives us the
first systematic examination of the way adaptations are produced: not
as versions or translations of an original, nor as mere mediations between
properly artistic fields of practice, but as a cultural form in their own
right – and one whose ascendency in our time has not, until now, been at
all adequately appreciated. This is a game-changing book which no one
interested in cultural theory or the contemporary narrative arts can afford
to ignore.
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

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The Adaptation Industry
The Cultural Economy of
Contemporary Literary Adaptation

Simone Murray
First published 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Murray, Simone.
The adaptation industry : the cultural economy of contemporary literary
adaptation / Simone Murray.
p. cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies ; 32)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature—Adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Film adaptations—
History and criticism. 3. Mass media and literature. 4. Cultural fusion.
I. Title.
PN171.A33 M87
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2011024305

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by IBT Global
For K.
Contents

List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgements xv

Introduction 1

1 What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the

Author in an Era of Cross-media Adaptation 25

2 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the

Contemporary Mediasphere 50

3 Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals

and Writers’ Weeks as Engine Rooms of Adaptation 76

4 The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-Winners

on Screen 103

5 Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure

of the Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation
Industry 131

6 Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies

for Converting Readers into Audiences 156

Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures 185

Notes 192
References 216
Index 245
List of Illustrations

Figures
2.1 Martin Amis caricature by Gerald Scarfe (1995), playing
on A.S. Byatt’s remark that Amis was ‘turkey-cocking’ other
writers through seeking an excessive advance 59
2.2 UK publishers’ rights policies, according to The Age
newspaper (Melbourne) 66
2.3 The Wylie Agency’s homepage, graphically signalling global
ambition 68
3.1 Berlinale at Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 promotional postcard
(front) 87
3.2 Rear of postcard, detailing the Film and Media Forum’s
2009 case study: adapting Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy 88
3.3 Front cover of Random House Australia’s Film Rights
Catalogue 2010 94
3.4 Authorial red-carpet appearance: Mariane Pearl and her
son Adam flanked by director Michael Winterbottom, star
Angelina Jolie and producer Brad Pitt at the Cannes Film
Festival premiere of A Mighty Heart (2007) 96
3.5 Book festivals’ politics of distinction 99
4.1 The Man Booker Prize’s growing US brand profile, as
revealed by Grove Atlantic’s US paperback front cover
design for Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) 112
4.2 Author Patrick McCabe’s cameo as town drunk Jimmy the
Skite in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy (1997) 120
4.3 Moral neutrality of print culture in Schindler’s List (1993):
a professor of literature and history is deemed a ‘non-essential’
worker 122
4.4 Itzhak Stern’s underground hand-press 122
4.5 ‘Aging’ the professor’s forged papers with crumpling,
gnawing of corners, and a spilt cup of coffee 123
4.6 Fascination with the mechanics of print culture: Schindler’s
List (1993) 124
xii Illustrations
4.7 Atonement (2007) 124
4.8 Front cover design of the published screenplay of
The English Patient (1997), jointly credited to director
Anthony Minghella and author Michael Ondaatje 129
6.1 Official website for The Reader (2008), showing attempts
to remediate the codex format and flagging of the novel’s
prize-winning pedigree (top left-hand corner) 177
6.2 Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Reader
showing (left to right) actor David Kross, author Bernhard
Schlink, actor Kate Winslet, scriptwriter David Hare,
director Stephen Daldry and actor Ralph Fiennes
(6 February 2009) 179
6.3 The Accompanied Literary Society’s official webpage, again
reimagining the book format for the computer screen 181
6.4 Listing of Accompanied Literary Society sponsors including
Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company 182

Tables
5.1 Andrew Davies’s adapted film and television screenplays 148
5.2 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adapted screenplays 148
5.3 Laura Jones’s adapted screenplays 149
Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive
value or formal transformations, but according to their modes of
existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and
appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified
within each.
(Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’,
in Foucault, 1977)

I have wanted to direct students to the texts and methods of sociology and
social history, and to urge them to supplement their interpretative
and critical readings of visual texts with attention to the institutional and
social processes of cultural production and consumption.
(Janet Wolff, ‘Cultural Studies and the
Sociology of Culture’, 2005)

Books are, finally, intricately interrelated to the rest of the media system
– economically, socially, intellectually, even symbolically; and those who
have envisioned or feared their wholesale removal from the system have
generally underestimated that involvement. If one would predict the death
of books, it is necessary to know how they live.
(Priscilla Coit Murphy, ‘Books Are Dead,
Long Live Books’, 1999)
Acknowledgements

The bulk of the research for this book was made possible by the award of
a Discovery Project grant (2007–09) by the Australian Research Council.
An earlier version of the Introduction appeared as ‘Materializing
Adaptation Theory: The Adaptation Industry’ in Literature/Film
Quarterly 36.1 (2008): 4–20. Some of the theoretical apparatus of the
current book was earlier worked through in ‘Books as Media: The
Adaptation Industry,’ International Journal of the Book 4.2 (2007):
23–30, and ‘Phantom Adaptations: Eucalyptus, the Adaptation Industry
and the Film that Never Was,’ Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on
Screen Studies 1.1 (2008): 5–23. I thank the journals’ editors and referees
for their encouraging early responses to the research findings.
I am also grateful for the insights that arose from interviews conducted
with various book- and screen-industry professionals: Elizabeth Haylett
Clark (Society of Authors, London); Deborah Moggach (London);
Lyn Tranter (Australian Literary Management, Sydney); Rick Raftos
(Sydney); Fiona Inglis (Curtis Brown (Australia), Sydney); Antony
Harwood (Oxford, UK); Julian Friedmann (Blake Friedman, London);
Anthony Lacey (Penguin Books, London); Helen Fraser (Penguin Books,
London); Nerrilee Weir (Random House Australia, Sydney); Annabel
Blay (HarperCollins Publishers Australia); Ion Trewin (Man Booker
Prizes, London); Bud McLintock (Costa Prize, London); and Kate Mosse
(Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, London).
For help accessing the enormous Booker Prize Archive at Oxford
Brookes University in the UK I thank subject librarian for publishing
Chris Fowler and archivist Eleanor Possart. Professor Roger Shannon of
Edge Hill University in the UK generously provided access to a highlights
DVD of his ‘Lost in Adaptation’ event convened in Birmingham (2005),
as well as a transcript of his keynote address to the ‘From the Blank Page
to the Silver Screen’ conference hosted by the Université de Bretagne Sud
in Lorient, France (2007).
Work-in-progress versions of the research project were presented
at conferences convened by the Australian and New Zealand
Communication Association (ANZCA), the International Conference on
xvi Acknowledgements
the Book, the Association of Literature on Screen Studies (subsequently
the Association for Adaptation Studies), the Institute for English Studies
at the University of London, ‘The Lives of the Book’ conference at Nancy
University, France, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading
and Publishing (SHARP), and the Bibliographical Society of Australia and
New Zealand (BSANZ). I have also enjoyed and benefitted from
delivering seminars about my adaptation industry research at the School
of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash
University, Melbourne, the School of English, Media Studies and Art
History at the University of Queensland, the School of Culture and
Communication at the University of Melbourne, the Department of
English and American Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, the
Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, the
International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University,
Oxford, UK, and the Research Institute for Media, Art and Design at the
University of Bedfordshire, UK.
My three research assistants helped to realise this book in the most
practical ways. I thank Belinda Mooney for energetically locating
resources and transcribing lengthy interviews in the project’s early phase;
Lawson Fletcher, whose extensive print and online research made him
an expert on the Weinsteins and The Reader, perhaps to his surprise; and
Kevin Patrick, who came on board in the later phases of the project
and demonstrated fine, self-starting research instincts and heroic photo-
copying prowess. Beyond their invaluable practical help, each alerted me
to analytical possibilities I hadn’t seen and on occasion spotted a few
howlers before they became immortalised in print.
My grateful thanks to members of the long-lived Posse for occasional
hijinks and consistent friendship. Closest to home, Kieran Hagan lived
with this project for several years. I thank him wholeheartedly for his
humour and constructive disinterest, and especially for enduring this
book’s writing-up, amidst much else.
Introduction

[T]he great innovators of the twentieth century, in film and novel both,
have had so little to do with each other, have gone their ways alone,
always keeping a firm but respectful distance.
(George Bluestone, Novels into Film, 2003 [1957]: 63)

I would suggest that what we need instead is a broader definition of

adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial
apparatus, the audience, and the academic culture industry.
(James Naremore, ‘Introduction: Film
and the Reign of Adaptation’, 2000b: 10)

The discipline of adaptation studies is nothing if not self-reflexive. Given its

subject matter, it could hardly be otherwise. In scrupulously self-conscious
manner, adaptation scholars are given to producing proliferating sur-
veys of the state of the discipline, rigorous questioning of underpinning
theoretical models, and rehearsings of the discipline’s historical trajectory.
Adaptation studies’ habitual checking of its own academic pulse is not,
of course, unique to it; other movements in the Humanities over recent
decades manifest similarly reflexive self-consciousness – in particular cul-
tural studies, women’s studies, and media and communication studies. Such
neurotic academic self-scrutiny results from each field’s interdiscipli-
nary origins, ensuring fundamental questions of theoretical models and
methodological approach could never be simply taken as read, but had to
be constructed and – specifically – defended against better established dis-
ciplines’ ongoing critique. Institutional settings also play a profound role in
instilling such (not entirely unproductive) disciplinary insecurity. In
adaptation studies’ case, its situation at the borderlands between traditional
literary studies and the newly emergent, often outright recusant, field of
film studies made courses analysing literary film adaptations institutional
cuckoos in the nest – reluctantly tolerated by literature departments eager
to stem the slide of undergraduate enrolments to film studies, but too
closely associated with screen media ever to be entirely academically
respectable. For the burgeoning discipline of film studies during the later
2 Introduction
decades of the twentieth century, courses in adaptation amounted to irri-
tants: constantly reminding screen studies of its formerly handmaiden status
to English departments and of literature academics’ sneering at the alleged
simple-mindedness and lowest-common-denominator pandering of screen
media. It did not help that adaptation studies scholars in the second half
of the twentieth century were often their own worst enemies, producing a
seemingly endless stream of repetitious and theoretically timid comparative
book/film case studies that served largely to confirm both disciplines’ direst
views of the field as an academic backwater. Spurned by the progressive
wings of both host disciplines, adaptations studies turned in on itself,
becoming in the process increasingly intellectually parochial, methodologi-
cally hidebound and institutionally risible (Leitch, 2007c [2003]; Murray,
2008a).

Around 2005
However, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, adaptation
studies has witnessed a sea-change of such scale as to transform the dire
disciplinary predicament summarised above. In dating this change to
around 2005, I am conscious of the arbitrariness of any such dateline,
seeming to rule out of contention as it does important works such as
Sarah Cardwell’s overdue examination of the specifics of classic televi-
sion series adaptations in Adaptation Revisited: Television and the
Classic Novel (2002), Kamilla Elliott’s exploration of inter-mediality in
Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003), and the numerous collections
edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (and colleagues),
which, from the 1990s onwards, calibrated adaptation studies’ increasing
engagement with popular culture (1999; 2000; 2007a). Yet by 2005 the
sense of a discipline reconfiguring itself, shaking off inherited assumptions
and re-examining all aspects of its self-conception was unmistakable. At
the international level, the establishment of the new scholarly society the
Association of Literature on Screen Studies (ALSS) prompted a series
of important annual conferences, beginning in Leicester, UK (2006),
Atlanta (2007), Amsterdam (2008), London (2009) and Berlin (2010).
The society’s prompt name change to the Association for Adaptation
Studies (AAS) severed the discipline’s long-standing and increasingly
theoretically uncomfortable privileging of a specific subset of print texts
in favour of an inclusivist conception of adaptation as a freewheeling
cultural process: flagrantly transgressing cultural and media hierarchies,
wilfully cross-cultural, and more weblike than straightforwardly linear in
its creative dynamic. An accompanying motivation behind the society’s
name change was to bring it more closely into line with the association’s
incipient journal, Adaptation (2008– ), designed as a forum for full-
length, theoretically ambitious research articles, produced under the
imprimatur of top-drawer academic publisher Oxford University Press.1
 Introduction 3
Adaptation thus added to the long-running short-format journal
Literature/Film Quarterly (1973– ), and was soon faced with another
newly launched scholarly endeavour, the rather more specifically titled
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (2008– ), published by
UK-based Intellect.
While the establishment of a new international scholarly association and
ambitious journals signalled renewal in adaptation studies’ institutional
structures, the most important post-2005 development in theoretical terms
has been the appearance of several path-breaking monographs and
anthologies by leading international scholars. The trilogy edited by Robert
Stam (two volumes in collaboration with Alessandra Raengo) and
published by Blackwell prompt my choice of 2005 as adaptation studies’
watershed year: A Companion to Literature and Film (2004), Literature
and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (2005),
and Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation
(2005a). Stam’s key contribution has been to imbue adaptation studies
with theoretical concepts derived from recent decades’ work in critical
theory – specifically post-structuralism, post-colonialism and identity
politics – and thus to reconceptualise adaptation as a process of endless
intertextual citation. Stam’s admirably cross-cultural and multilingual
range of examples, as well as his general emphasis on adaptation as inter-
textual dialogism, are echoed in Linda Hutcheon’s important A Theory
of Adaptation (2006), which moreover goes beyond Stam in expanding
its media foci well beyond the traditional dyad of film and novel (read
as Literature) to encompass television, theatre, opera, music, computer
gaming, and theme-park rides. Julie Sanders’ Adaptation and Appropriation
(2006), appearing in the same year and from the same publisher as
Hutcheon’s volume, similarly foregrounds theatrical performance as a key
but often neglected concern of adaptation studies and – again in common
with Stam and Hutcheon – emphasises audiences’ pleasure in actively
counterpointing the familiar and the new in their experience of adap-
tations’ palimpsestic nature. Two more recent monographs, from scholars
both strongly imbued with conceptual paradigms grounded in film studies,
have contributed to the sense of accelerating momentum, building into
adaptation studies’ veritable twenty-first-century ‘new wave’. Thomas
Leitch’s appositely named Film Adaptation and its Discontents (2007a)
probes the boundaries of extant adaptations models, staging raiding
parties into territories typically ignored by the discipline because of the
problematic issues they raise for traditional modes of thinking. Self-
describing as ‘a study not so much of specific adaptations as of specific
problems adaptations raise’, Leitch’s work examines adaptation’s limit-
cases, including non-fiction adaptations, adaptations from visual arts,
computer-gaming adaptations and scriptural adaptations (20). Christine
Geraghty, whose Now a Major Motion Picture (2008) similarly bears
the strong impress of the author’s film and television studies training,
4 Introduction
challenges adaptation studies to pay sustained attention to adapted texts
themselves. Here the source text is itself emphatically marginalised and
detailed textual analyses drawn in particular from genre theory elucidate
specifically non-literary concepts such as mise en scène, editing, acting
styles, lighting, sound and costume. Taken together, these monographs,
often explicitly referencing each other and reviewed by other authors
from within the group, bear testament to – and through their near-
contemporaneous appearance themselves accelerate – the pace of change
underway in adaptation studies.2 Reading them alongside recent journal
issues, and accompanied by first-hand experience of international AAS
conference meets, there is an undeniable sense of intellectual ferment
bubbling in the discipline. Adaptation studies is surely, to switch meta-
phors, stirring from its long disciplinary slumber, giving rise to a palpable
sense of excitement that now might – finally – be adaptation studies’ time.

Lingering Blind Spots

And yet, for all the sense of a discipline joyfully kicking over the traces of
previously dominant and long-outdated thinking, there is much that stays
obdurately the same. Granted adaptation studies discourse has moved on
from its previously core business of comparative aesthetic evaluation (in
which screen adaptations were, predictably, usually found wanting) to
that of ideologically alert deconstruction – scrutinising adapted texts for
their critical reworking of power structures often only covertly registered
in source texts. In many of the scholarly volumes already mentioned
there is also a throwing open of the disciplinary windows to engage with
concepts of audience agency derived from reader response theory (in
literary theory circles) and, particularly, cultural studies-style media
ethnographies (dominant in film and television studies spheres). But over-
whelmingly, the intellectual project which new-wave adaptation studies
sets itself takes, paradoxically, a tamely familiar methodological guise:
namely, textual analysis.3 The upshot of this under-examined preference
for scrutinising nuances of texts is a curious and troubling disinterest in
how adaptations come to be, specifically how the various institutional,
commercial and legal frameworks surrounding adaptations profoundly
influence the number and the character of adaptations in cultural circula-
tion. Nudging adaptation studies beyond its intellectual comfort zone of
textual analysis and closely related questions of medium specificity allows
us to conceive of something often heralded in adaptation studies but not,
to date, fully realised: namely, a sociology of adaptation.4 Such an
approach takes us well beyond textual specifics and enables us to ask how
the mechanisms by which adaptations are produced influence the kinds
of adaptations released, how certain audiences become aware of adapted
properties, and how the success of an adaptation may impact differently
upon various industry stakeholders. A sociology of adaptation in fact
 Introduction 5
provides an entry point for examining just how unexpectedly contested
and fraught are the cross-media and cross-sectoral relationships that
make adaptation possible. For adaptations set off fireworks not only in
their disciplinary reception, but also in their very institutional creation.
Adapted texts may be interesting, in short, not so much for their intricate
ideological encodings, but for the way they illuminate the contexts of
their own production – a sphere in which competing ideologies are just
as prevalent, albeit largely ignored by commentators outside of the
industries themselves.5
The foregoing should not be taken to suggest that the new wave of
adaptation studies has had nothing pertinent to say about extra-textual
dimensions of adaptation. Christine Geraghty, for example, breaks new
ground in her chapter considering how film reviewing practices to an
extent precondition audiences’ reception of particular texts by presenting
them as adaptations (2008: 47–72). Yet this is, as Geraghty herself states,
largely a contextual sideline to a study that is overwhelmingly textual in
focus (5). When new-wave adaptation studies has discussed adaptations’
conditions of production and circulation, these fairly scanty examinations
have tended to fall into one of two patterns. The first posits commercial
contexts as irredeemably corrupting influences on art and culture, as in
Robert Stam’s distaste for the suburbanisation and ‘aesthetic main-
streaming’ he sees as commonly imposed by Hollywood ‘in the name of
monies spent and box-office profits required’ (Stam and Raengo, 2005:
43). This sketchily indicated but ominously named ‘adaptation machine’
typically debases Stam’s preferred genre of self-reflexive and playfully
ironic literary texts, shutting down and anaesthetising their subversive
potential (2005: 43).6 Linda Hutcheon’s otherwise welcome chapter on
the ‘Who? Why?’ elements of adaptation – namely, the professional and
commercial motivations for adapting familiar texts – also uncomfortably
echoes Frankfurt School-style denunciations of commerce’s debasing
impact on creative integrity. Not only the tone but also the very vocab-
ulary of Adorno and Horkheimer can be heard in her lament at the
lowest-common-denominator ethos of Hollywood, especially in her fatal-
istic and borderline economic–determinist conclusion that ‘the entertain-
ment industry is just that: an industry’ (2006: 88).
The second pattern of engagement with adaptation’s production
context exhibits similarities with the first but is less arbitrarily dismissive.
Thomas Leitch, perhaps reflecting his current principal identification with
film rather than literary studies, devotes an innovative chapter to
‘postliterary adaptations’ such as comics, board games, theme-park rides
and computer games, examining them as extensions of existing brand
franchises (2007a: 257–79). Refusing simply to condemn these outright
as beneath scholarly attention, Leitch rightly notes that an increasing
proportion of Academy Award nominations for best adapted screenplay
is derived from such non-literary sources. But his term ‘postliterary’ is
6 Introduction
problematic for its implication that literary sources constitute merely one
stage in the adaptation phenomenon’s narrative, beyond which it is now
evolving. This sets up a false dichotomy between literary (old) and con-
temporary (pop culture) sources whereby classic books can be recognised
as pre-sold brands, but contemporary literary fiction seemingly evades
similar market logic, even though public recognition of a prize-winning
recent novel may outweigh familiarity with a canonised but little-read text
(refer also DeBona, 2010: 28). For a cursory glance again at Academy
Award nominations simultaneously confirms that literary sources –
especially prize-winning contemporary literary works – remain a rich
source of inspiration for prestige screen adaptations.7 By exploring the
limit-case of adaptations that are indifferent to traditional gauges of
cultural esteem such as blockbuster film franchises based on comic books,
Leitch implies that avowedly literary works, especially contemporary
ones, lie beyond such a ‘market-driven approach to adaptation’ (278).

The Adaptation Industry

The premise of this book is that considering contemporary literary
adaptations through the prism of the adaptation industry throws new
light on the processes by which adaptations come to be made, the forms
they take, and the audiences who encounter them. The incorporation of
the phrase ‘cultural economy’ in my book’s subtitle, yoking together two
terms often considered antithetical, is designed to distance this book
from adaptations studies’ previous over-easy association of commerce
with cultural taint (ironic, given new-wave adaptation studies argues so
strenuously in its turn against old-school literary studies’ assumption
that adaptations are themselves an innately debased and debasing phe-
nomenon). The Adaptation Industry is designed to showcase a broadly
sociological approach to adaptation, foregrounding those issues usually
pushed to the margins of adaptation studies work: the industrial struc-
tures, interdependent networks of agents, commercial contexts, and legal
and policy regimes within which adaptations come to be. This encom-
passing adaptation industry both constrains and – crucially – enables
adaptations in little-analysed ways. In particular, this study posits cultural
and commercial concerns not as mutually antithetical or self-cancelling,
but as complexly interrelated. It rejects on one hand political economy’s
habitual demonising of market effects and, on the other, cultural studies’
easy slippage into market fundamentalism through bracketing off entirely
questions of cultural evaluation in favour of a market-share-based cul-
tural populism. Instead, this study invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of
culture as always embedded in sociological contexts, encapsulated in
his productive concept of the cultural ‘field’ (1993).8 In this analytical
space structured by institutions, agents and the webs of relationships
between them, attributions of cultural esteem may trigger significant
 Introduction 7
commercial dividends and, contrariwise, commercial success has flow-on
effects for cultural prevalence and evaluation. Examined in detail on a
sectoral and cross-sectoral basis, the adaptation industry rapidly frus-
trates any scholarly attempts at neat disaggregation of culture and
commerce. Through tracing the complex workings of the adaptation
industry as they relate to contemporary self-described literary adapta-
tions, this study makes clear that the cultural economy’s currencies of
critical prestige and financial reward are both in play at all times, and that
their relationship may be – if not in direct proportion – at least not in
indirect ratio either.
Considering the contemporary adaptation industry in such a delib-
erately contextual manner also means factoring in the influence of adap-
tation studies itself on the workings of the adaptation system. Such
entanglement of the observer with that which is observed – akin to the
Schrödinger’s cat analogy in the hard sciences – seems the necessary latest
step in adaptation studies’ long history of self-reflexivity. For, unfamiliar
and potentially uncomfortable though the idea might be, the ways in
which certain contemporary literary adaptations are made available to
and are avidly taken up by the academy for analysis, commentary and
curricular incorporation themselves feed back into the adaptation indus-
try’s workings. As James Naremore suggests in his formulation of the
‘academic culture industry’, we are ourselves agents in the system we seek
to analyse. Thus, not only is the production apparatus that constitutes the
adaptation industry the heretofore under-examined ‘dark continent’ of
adaptation studies, it appears that we as adaptation critics and theorists
have unwittingly been complicit in its operations all along. Surely then
it is time we began to turn our attention to better understanding its
workings.

Previous Waves of Innovation in Adaptation Studies

In taking adaptation studies to task for its uncritical adherence to textual
analysis as its governing methodology, I am not suggesting that adap-
tation studies has been devoid of innovation, only that such prior waves
of innovation as have occurred have experimented within severely
confined limits. To provide background and context to the current book’s
underpinning argument in favour of an overdue materialising of adap-
tation theory, it is useful briefly to survey the major schools of adaptation
studies that have developed during the discipline’s past half century, and
to note – with a nod to adaptations studies’ own modus operandi – both
their differences and their marked similarities. Characterising virtually all
academic studies of book-to-screen adaptation is an attack on the model
of fidelity criticism as an inadequate schema for appreciating the richness
of and motivations driving adaptations (Marcus, 1971: xv; McDougal,
1985: 6; Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990: xix, 9–10; Cartmell and
8 Introduction
Whelehan, 1999: 3; 2007a: 2; Ray, 2000: 45; Leitch, 2003: 161–62;
2007a: 16–17, 21; Hutcheon, 2006: xiii, 6–7; 2007; Geraghty, 2008: 11;
Cartmell, Corrigan and Whelehan, 2008: 2). Such ritual rejections of
fidelity criticism are frequently accompanied by revelation of fidelity
critique’s moralistic, sexually loaded and near-hysterically judgmental
vocabulary, with its accusations of ‘unfaithfulness’, ‘betrayal’, ‘straying’,
‘taking liberties’, ‘debasement’, ‘corruption’ and the like (Beja, 1979: 81;
Naremore, 2000b: 8; Stam, 2000: 54; Hutcheon, 2004: 109; 2006: 7, 85;
2007; Stam and Raengo, 2005: 3; Hunter, 2009: 10). Unquestionably,
rejecting the idea of film adaptation as a necessarily inferior imitation of
literary fiction’s allegedly singular artistic achievement was an essential
critical manoeuvre if adaptation studies was to gain entry to the academy.
But most striking in reading back over 50 years of academic criticism
about adaptation is not the dead hand of fidelity criticism, but – quite the
opposite – how few academic critics make any claim for fidelity criticism
at all. Bluestone’s own seminal study posited at its outset that ‘the film-
maker merely treats the novel as raw material and ultimately creates his
[sic] own unique structure’, with the novel firmly put in its place as ‘less
a norm than a point of departure’ (2003: vii, viii).9
A variation on the outright rejection of fidelity as directorial goal or
critical norm involves taxonomically classifying adaptations by use of a
sliding scale of graded ‘levels’ or ‘modes’ of fidelity, according to ‘whether
the film is a literal, critical, or relatively free adaptation of the literary
source’ (Klein and Parker, 1981: 9; also similar in Wagner, 1975: 219–31;
Larsson, 1982: 74; Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999: 24; Andrew, 2000
[1984]: 29–34; Cahir, 2006: 16–17; Cordaiy, 2007: 34). Certainly this
goes some way towards equalising the respective status of author and
director, according screen adaptors relatively greater creative agency. But
fidelity is an absolute value; once a source text has been ‘strayed’ from,
the critical measuring stick of ‘fidelity’ loses its evaluative rigour. Given
this, comparative gradings of fidelity are in fact closer to Bluestone’s
outright rejection of the concept than may be apparent at first glance.
Reading back through twentieth-century adaptation criticism, the sus-
picion grows that, while fidelity models may remain prevalent in film and
television reviewing, in cultural journalism, and in everyday evaluations
by the film-going public, in academic circles the ritual slaying of fidelity
criticism at the outset of a work long ago ossified into an habitual gesture,
devoid of any real intellectual challenge.10 After all, if no one in academe
is actually advocating the antiquated notion of fidelity, what is there to
overturn? It appears more likely that the standardised routing of fidelity
criticism has come to function as a shibboleth, lending the guise of
methodological and theoretical innovation to studies which routinely
reproduced the set model of comparative textual analysis. Given this, it is
welcome that adaptation studies’ most recent wave of critics are now
tending to eschew not only fidelity discourse, but also the explanatory
 Introduction 9
outline coupled with ritual rejection of fidelity discourse, as ‘it is widely
recognised that it is time to move on’ (Geraghty, 2008: 1). Still, one has
to marvel at the obdurate hold of a theoretical model that is mentioned
in spite of the same critics’ claim that even stating that one will not
be mentioning it is old hat. Like the psychologically repressed, fidelity
discourse simply will not go away, when even declared refusal to engage
with it brings the term paradoxically back into play (as has, of course,
occurred here). It appears just as well that adaptation studies is pre-
disposed towards self-reflexivity.
The second significant wave in adaptation studies’ disciplinary genesis
appeared from the late 1970s with the importation of principles of nar-
ratology from the traditions of Russian formalist literary theory, struc-
turalism and Continental semiotics (Beja, 1979; Cohen, 1979; Ruppert,
1980; Klein and Parker, 1981; Andrew, 2000 [1984]). Theorists such as
Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette and Christian Metz were heavily cited in
this stream of adaptation work which lingered, in some cases, well into the
1990s (Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990; McFarlane, 1996).11 The
surprise is the tenacity of narratology’s hold over adaptation studies,
given that by the late 1980s post-structuralist distrust of the rule-seeking,
pseudo-scientific predilections of structuralism had well and truly achieved
dominance in the Anglophone academy. The structuralist-inspired quest
to isolate the signifying ‘codes’ underpinning both literature and film had
the worthwhile aim of dismantling received academic hierarchies of
mediums in which literature occupied the apex, and the interloper of
screen studies was relegated to the lowest critical echelons (Cohen, 1979:
3). It moreover recast adaptation as a two-way dynamic, where novelistic
narrative techniques not only influenced film, but certain filmic devices
were avidly imitated by Modernist writers well-versed in an increasingly
visual culture (Beja, 1979: 51–76; Cohen, 1979: 2–10; Andrew, 2000
[1984]: 36). But the structuralist school of adaptation confines inter-
relationship of the two mediums strictly to the level of textual effects.
Structuralism’s characteristic isolation of texts from circuits of production
and consumption, or from sociologies of media culture generally, left its
methodological impress upon adaptation studies. The effect was that, for
all the narratological school’s self-declared and partially justifiable revolu-
tionary rhetoric, the movement managed to entrench further the practice
of textual analysis as adaptation studies’ default methodological setting
and unquestioned academic norm.12
In what this discussion has previously posited as twenty-first-century
‘new-wave’ adaptation studies (chronologically speaking, roughly the
third major wave of innovation in the discipline), the importation of con-
cepts from post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminism and cultural
studies broke down one part of the self-isolating critical wall built up
around the text, and opened up adaptation studies to concepts of audi-
ence agency.13 Emerging incrementally from the 1980s, but accelerating
10 Introduction
after the turn of the millennium, this development (handily dubbed ‘The
Impact of the Posts’ by one of its key proponents, Robert Stam) placed
audience pleasure in intertextual citation front and centre of its critical
concerns (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 8). Accordingly, fidelity criticism was
deemed not only a woefully blunt instrument with which to examine
adaptations, but wilful infidelity was in fact the very point: adaptations
interrogated the political and ideological underpinnings of their source
texts, translating works across cultural, gender, racial and sexual
boundaries to secure cultural space for marginalised discourses. This post-
structuralist reconceptualisation of adaptation as critique – which Stam
terms ‘intertextual dialogism’ and Hutcheon dubs ‘transculturation’ –
borrows from Bakhtin and Kristeva to posit culture as a vast web of
references and tropes ripe for appropriating, disassembling and rearrang-
ing [italics in original] (Stam, 2000: 64; Hutcheon, 2006: xvi; Leitch,
2003: 165–67; 2007: 18; Hutcheon, 2004: 108–11; 2007; Aragay, 2005;
Boozer, 2008: 20; DeBona, 2010: 5, 12). More specifically cultural
studies-inflected concepts which also reinvigorated the study of adap-
tation included the permeability of high/pop cultural boundaries, overdue
acknowledgement of extra-literary sources for adaptations such as pulp
fiction, comic books/graphic novels and computer games, and recognition
of resistant or oppositional audience decodings of texts in ways possibly
not anticipated by textual producers (Cartmell and Whelehan, 1999;
2007a; Hutcheon, 2006; Leitch, 2007a; Geraghty, 2008). The recognition
that audiences appreciate adaptations precisely because of the mass of
existing pop-cultural knowledge they bring to them was decisive in wean-
ing adaptation studies from its long preoccupation with the nineteenth-
century Anglo-American literary canon, and for introducing an ethno-
graphic dimension into the analysis of adaptation.
Yet, as so often in adaptation studies, it is a case of two steps forward
and one back as, for all its productive theoretical innovation, this now-
dominant third wave of adaptation studies has come at a price. I have
outlined already how post-structuralism’s and cultural studies’ charac-
teristic disinterest in conditions of cultural production has created a
lopsidedness within adaptation studies between, on one hand, intense
interest in audience consumption practices but, on the other, little counter-
vailing attention to the production contexts, financial structures and legal
regimes facilitating the adaptations boom.14 The blame for this imbalance
cannot, however, be sheeted home entirely to post-structuralism, cultural
studies and their affiliate ‘posts’.
Political economy, the school of media studies dominant in UK,
Canadian and Australian (if never US) academe during the 1960s and
1970s was, by the 1980s, engaged in a frequently bitter academic turf war
with cultural studies over the relative merits of material and semiotic
frameworks for analysing media (Curran, 1990). As a result, political
economy was too impatient with the new wave’s rejection of economically
 Introduction 11
grounded (neo-)Marxist cultural models to be inclined to investigate what
reception theory had to offer for political economy’s understanding of
adaptation. Furthermore, political economy’s traditional home in the
social sciences (especially in politics and sociology departments) made
industrial-scale cultural producers such as newspaper chains and television
networks favoured media for examination, in preference to the tradi-
tionally Humanities-affiliated (and specifically literary studies-affiliated)
format of the book. The content recycling function at the heart of adap-
tation was noted in passing by individual political economists from the
1970s in analyses of ‘synergy’ within the operations of globalised media
conglomerates (Murdock and Golding, 1977; Whiteside, 1981). But as the
waves of consolidation that brought book publishing into the fold of
corporate media were at that time mostly yet to be felt, novels and short
stories were paid only glancing attention by political economy as the most
common source of adapted content. More rigorous attention has been paid
by political economists to such book-format content’s subsequent fran-
chising from film to theme-park, computer-game and spin-off merchandis-
ing forms, rather taking up the analysis mid-way through the adaptation
process (Wasko, 1994; 2001; 2003; Elsaesser, 1998; Balides, 2000). A gap
has therefore emerged, and remains evident. Neither macro-oriented
political economy nor textual- and audience-focussed cultural studies was
predisposed to examine the how and why of adaptation from the per-
spective of the authors, agents, publishers, editors, book prize committees,
screenwriters, directors and producers who actually make adaptations
happen.
A final point to make in tracing how the study of the contemporary
book–screen adaptation industry has slipped through the intellectual net
of adaptation studies, cultural studies and political economy relates to
the kind of texts chosen for analysis by these respective disciplines. As
outlined in relation to Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents,
adaptation studies has traditionally focussed greatest attention on the
nineteenth-century and Modernist Anglophone literary canon (Lupack,
1999; Cartmell, Hunter, Kaye and Whelehan, 2000). Cultural studies, for
its part, originated in another disciplinary rebellion – this time against
English literary studies’ adamantine hostility to investigating popular
culture as a legitimate topic for academic inquiry. As a consequence,
cultural studies has always preferred to examine demonstrably ‘popular’
genres such as romance novels, pulps, crime fiction, westerns or comic
books whose very non-literariness badges them as suitable intellectual
ground for cultural studies’ relativist semiotic project. The combined
effect of these disciplines’ textual orientation is that the processes by
which contemporary literary fiction is created, published, marketed,
evaluated for literary prizes and adapted for screen have lacked sustained
academic attention. That these powerful institutions forming the con-
temporary adaptation economy – with all the dynamism, alliances and
12 Introduction
rivalry characterising economies of all kinds – have been overlooked by
cognate disciplines has bequeathed to scholars a severely flawed under-
standing of how the contemporary adaptation industry actually functions.
Attention to texts and audiences cannot of itself explain how these
adaptations come to be available for popular and critical consumption,
nor the intricate production circuits through which they move on their
way to audiences, nor the mechanisms of elevation in which the adap-
tation culture industry – and hence adaptation scholars also – is funda-
mentally complicit.

The Costs of Textual Analysis as Methodological

Orthodoxy
Having sketched the background of adaptation studies to date and noted
its methodological lacunae, I will proceed to examine in further detail
how lack of attention to production contexts has compromised current
understandings of adaptation. From there, I outline this book’s alternative
model which aims to capture the complexity of the adaptation industry
and thereby to contribute to a long-overdue materialising of adaptation
theory.
Adaptation critics’ comparative ignorance of book industry dynamics
has perpetuated a distorted understanding of adaptation, distilled here to
three oft-encountered ‘myths’ of adaptation studies.15 The first of these –
and by far the most frequently encountered – is the claim that books are
the product of individualised, isolated authorial creation, whereas film
and television result from collaborative, industrialised processes (Beja,
1979: 60–62; McDougal, 1985: 5; Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990:
2; Reynolds, 1993: 8; Ray, 2000: 42; Stam, 2000: 56; Stam and Raengo,
2005: 17; Cahir, 2006: 72). As so often when seeking the origins of adap-
tation studies’ methodological rubric, the roots of this fallacy can be
traced directly back to Bluestone (Leitch, 2003: 150):

The reputable novel, generally speaking, has been supported by a

small, literate audience, has been produced by an individual writer,
and has remained relatively free of rigid censorship. The film, on the
other hand, has been supported by a mass audience, produced co-
operatively under industrial conditions, and restricted by a self-
imposed Production Code. These developments have reinforced
rather than vitiated the autonomy of each medium.
(2003: vi)16

In seeking to debunk this myth of isolated authorial creation, I am not

denying that a clear difference in organisational and financial scale exists
between the writing of, for example, a battle scene in a novel and the
filmic realisation of its equivalent. The problem arises from the fact that
 Introduction 13
adaptation critics when they use the terms ‘book’ or ‘novel’ are in truth
almost always speaking of ‘text’ – that is, they are invoking an abstract
idea of an individual author’s creative work rather than the material
object of the specific book in which that work is transmitted.17 As the
discipline of book history has amply demonstrated since first emerging in
1950s France (curiously contemporaneous with the appearance of
adaptation studies in the Anglophone academy), books have for centuries
depended upon complex circuits of printers, binders, hawkers, publishers,
booksellers, librarians, collectors and readers for the dissemination of
ideas in literate societies (Febvre and Martin, 1990 [1958]; Escarpit,
1966; 1971; Darnton, 1990; Adams and Barker, 1993). Thus the book is
demonstrably as much the product of institutions, agents and material
forces as is the Hollywood blockbuster. Yet adaptation theorists regularly
emphasise the power of Hollywood’s political economy as though books
were quasi-virginal texts untouched by commercial concerns prior to their
screen adaptation (Beja, 1979; Bluestone, 2003; Leitch, 2003).18 This
leads to curious and easily disproved assertions that authors ‘have (for
better or worse) been largely able to write whatever pleased them, without
regard for audience or expense’ (Ray, 2000: 42), as ‘questions of material
infrastructure enter only at the point of distribution’ (Stam, 2000: 56).19
Book history has amply demonstrated that the commercial sub-
structures of book culture have existed since at least the Gutenberg
revolution. But these industrial characteristics have become massively
more pronounced since major book publishers were subsumed by global
media conglomerates, especially from the early 1980s onwards (Miller,
1997; Schiffrin, 2001; Epstein, 2001; Murray, 2006). Critics of the
contemporary book publishing industry frequently observe that the
potential marketability of authors, and the optioning of their work for
adaptation across other media, are key considerations in the signing
of, especially, first-time authors – a phenomenon explored in detail in
Chapter 1 (Engelhardt, 1997; Gardiner, 2000b; McPhee, 2001).
Moreover, these considerations all come into play prior to contracting;
thereafter the book will also be extensively costed, edited, designed,
proof-read, marketed, publicised, rights-shopped at book fairs, distri-
buted to retail and online outlets (hopefully), discussed in the literary
public sphere, and readers’ perceptions of the work will have been exten-
sively mediated through networks of reviews, book prizes, writers’
festivals, book signings, face-to-face book clubs or their electronic and
online equivalents (Hartley, 2001; Long, 2003; Sedo, 2003; Mackenzie,
2005; Hutcheon, 2007; Newman, 2008). A complex literary economy
therefore governs the production and dissemination of books from their
earliest phases. Moreover, adaptation for the screen is not merely an add-
on or after-thought to this complex economy, but is now factored in and
avidly pursued from the earliest phases of book production. This gives the
lie to the oft-repeated mantra of authorial ‘autonomy’ prevalent in
14 Introduction
adaptation studies and such critics’ demonstrably inaccurate juxtaposi-
tion of a Romanticised, solitary author–genius on one hand, with
Hollywood’s ‘mode of industrial production’ on the other (Bluestone,
2003: 34).20
Further, understanding of the book industry economy fundamentally
challenges adaptation theory’s always implicit – and often explicit –
classification of books as ‘niche’ whereas film is designated a ‘mass’
medium (Beja, 1979: 60–61; Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990: 2;
Leitch, 2003: 155; Hutcheon, 2006: 5). When analysing the weight of
financial interests and industry strategising brought to bear on the release
of new novels by bestselling writers such as Stephen King, Dan Brown or
Stephenie Meyer – or even high-profile literary authors such as Salman
Rushdie, Ian McEwan or Annie Proulx – it is impossible to deny that the
book industry is as thoroughly complicit in marketing and publicity
processes as are its screen-media equivalents (Gelder, 2004; Brown, 2006;
Phillips, 2007; Squires, 2007). Granted, the scale of campaign spend may
differ between sectors, but the centrality of marketing to both industries
is incontrovertible. The fact that book publishers and film studios
increasingly find themselves affiliate divisions within overarching media
conglomerates makes the incorporation of a season’s lead title into the
production, marketing and distribution schedules of electronic and digital
media holdings all the more feasible and attractive (Izod, 1992; Murray,
2006; 2007b). Indeed, as film studies political economist Thomas Schatz
has recently argued, ‘distinctions between literature and film and between
art and entertainment become meaningless when dealing with contem-
porary Hollywood’. Adaptation studies will, Schatz provokes, only be
fully able to comprehend its object of study once it conceptualises book
and screen media as components of a single, converged ‘global enter-
tainment industry’ (2009: 80).
A second myth of adaptation studies deriving from critics’ current
dematerialised conception of the adaptation phenomenon is the belief that
adaptation’s trajectory is necessarily from the ‘old’ media of the book to
the ‘new(er)’ media of film, television and digital media. This assumed
linearity is manifested explicitly in the titles of adaptation studies such as
Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film (1996) and Linda Costanzo Cahir’s
post-2005-era Literature into Film (2006).21 Clearly, this fallacy stems
from an historicist conception of media development in which mediums
are seen to supersede earlier communication technologies in a process of
serial eclipse. Instead, the reality of media environments over the last
century has been that newer media do cannibalise the content of older
media, but mediums continue to exist contemporaneously, rearranging
themselves into new patterns of usage and mutual dependence. This
complementarity of communications formats was noted in media studies
as early as the work of Marshall McLuhan, and has since been repeatedly
elaborated by medium theorists, notably Jay David Bolter and Richard
 Introduction 15
Grusin in their exploration of cross-platform ‘remediation’ (McLuhan
(2001) [1964]; Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Murphy, 1999; Holmes, 2005).
That these intellectual trends in the broader field of communications have
had so little impact within adaptation studies testifies to the parochialising
effects of adaptation studies’ common institutional separation from social
science-based programmes in media studies.
Granted, even Bluestone devoted a paragraph to the observation that
‘[j]ust as one line of influence runs from New York publishing house to
Hollywood studio, another line may be observed running the other way’
(2003: 4). But his discussion notes only the positive impact of film
versions on sales of the original novel; he does not expand his perspective
to examine how film content commonly forms the basis of new print-
form products, a phenomenon documented well before the 1950s when
Bluestone was writing.22 Over 20 years after Bluestone, critic Morris Beja
similarly dedicated two pages of an adaptation monograph to discussing
the coexistence of novelisations and source novels, but he begins this
potentially innovative line of inquiry with the tellingly digressive throw-
away ‘incidentally’ (1979: 87). As far as the first two waves of adaptations
studies were concerned, the book industry served as handmaiden supply-
ing film-ready content to the screen industries; it was a relationship
between mediums reciprocated only intermittently.
By the time the third wave of adaptation studies first emerged in the late
1980s, the increasing evidence of adaptation’s print-based ‘afterlife’ in the
form of ‘tie-in’ editions, novelisations, published screenplays, ‘making-
off’ books and companion titles had become incontestable. Equipped with
their greater theoretical cognisance of popular culture, such adapta-
tion scholars began to note the proliferation of such book-form texts, and
even their circulation simultaneous with screen versions. Again, this
belated recognition of adaptation’s two-way (or multi-way) traffic is
flagged in the title of an influential anthology: Cartmell and Whelehan’s
Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text (1999). But such critics’
use of these ‘companion texts’ is – true to the discipline’s generally unac-
knowledged textual analysis bias – to treat them as convenient additional
sites for semiotic analysis, not to examine how they came to be produced
or their role in cross-promoting content franchises to a range of audiences
(Whelehan, 1999: 5–6; cf. Izod, 1992: 101–02). What is still lacking in
adaptation studies is a thorough understanding of whose financial
interests these ‘spin-off’ print properties serve, the intellectual property
and licensing arrangements by which they are governed, and how audi-
ences experience this multi-platform encounter with broadly similar
content – specifically whether audiences invest content consumed on dif-
ferent platforms with varying degrees of cultural prestige or authority.23
The third and final corollary of adaptation studies’ prevailing academic
indifference to the adaptation economy is perhaps not as strongly marked
as the first two, given it concerns the more abstruse concept of the rise and
16 Introduction
fall of literary reputations. Literary prestige has remained a mostly
marginalised topic in adaptation studies, being either already abundantly
established in the case of ‘classic’ authors whose canonical works are
adapted for the screen or, in the case of popular culture texts such as
comic books or computer games, amounting to an irrelevant concern
according to the relativist rubric of cultural studies (Stam and Raengo,
2005: 45; Leitch, 2007a: 258, 278–79). Rarely examined is the phenom-
enon of contemporary writers who self-identify as ‘literary’ authors
whose work is adapted for other media, and how circulation of these
broadly contemporaneous screen texts triggers inflation or devaluation
of their literary stocks.24 The stock-exchange metaphor invoked here
traces its origins to Bourdieu’s influential essay ‘The Field of Cultural
Production’ (1983), with its telling subtitle ‘The Economic World
Reversed’ (see Bourdieu 1993]). US literary sociologist James F. English
has observed in his analysis of cultural prizes, The Economy of Prestige
(2005) – a book itself intensively engaged with Bourdieusian theory – that
the fascination of questions of literary value derives from their siting at
the juncture of two philosophically hostile conceptual systems: the aes-
thetic and the commercial. The concept of literary esteem is never entirely
reducible to either system operating alone, but is instead energised by its
situation at the clashing tectonic plates of both systems. How adaptations
factor into this innately volatile system for accrediting or withholding of
literary reputation is a compelling topic mostly unexplored in relation to
contemporary authors (as opposed to long-canonical, and more recently
mass-market, authors such as Jane Austen).25 The topic’s interest stems
also from its intermeshing with the broader literary and cultural economy
of agents, editors, publishers, prize-judging committees, book retailers,
and cultural journalists already mentioned. Focussing critical attention on
literary reputations in the process of being ‘brokered’ within the adap-
tation economy provides a fascinating insight into the adaptation industry
at work, and the shifting alliances and conflicts that inevitably arise
between its nodal agents.

Proposing a New Methodology for Adaptation Studies

From the foregoing, it will be readily apparent that this book’s key aim is
to rethink adaptation, not as an exercise in comparative textual analysis
of individual print works and their screen versions, but as a material
phenomenon produced by a system of interlinked interests and actors. In
short, adaptation studies urgently needs to divert its intellectual energies
from a questionable project of aesthetic evaluation, and instead begin to
understand adaptation economically and institutionally. To do so, it is
necessary to move out from under the aegis of long-dominant formal-
ist and textual analysis traditions to investigate what cognate fields
of cultural research might have to offer adaptation studies in terms of
 Introduction 17
alternative methodologies. These then need to be critically assessed for
their own analytical blind spots, as well as for how they might profitably
be combined into a hybrid methodology supple enough to capture the
workings of the contemporary adaptation industry.

Political Economy of Media

The political economy strand of media analysis originates in the critiques
of the early-twentieth-century Frankfurt School, reviving with an interest
in issues of ownership and control of media in the 1960s and 1970s, and
informing a more recent wave of research around the commercialisa-
tion of digital media. These most recent additions to the discipline have
demonstrated the vital relevance of materially engaged critique for eluci-
dating developments in the contemporary cultural sphere (Mosco, 1996;
Schiller, 1999; Wasko, 2001; 2003; Doyle, 2002). Political economy’s
realist, materialist and interdisciplinary methodology critically illuminates
content’s key role in contemporary media industries. Technological con-
vergence around digital platforms has coincided with increasing conver-
gence of ownership amongst globalised media corporations to create a
commercial environment favouring the multipurposing or ‘streaming’ of
media content to orchestrate cross-platform franchises (Elsaesser, 1998;
Balides, 2000; Murray, 2003a; 2005; Jenkins, 2006; Grainge, 2008). The
key characteristic and commercial utility of contemporary media content
appear to be its potential dissociation from any one media platform and
its simultaneous replication across a range of mediums via digitisation.
Clearly this is adaptation operating under a different name. However, for
reasons that are more institutional than theoretical, political economy of
media has, as outlined earlier, tended to relegate the book to the periphery
of its analytical concern because of an inherited preference for broadcast
and networked media.

History of the Book

The second cognate methodology proposed here, history of the book (also
termed ‘book history’), traces its own complex disciplinary history from
French historical studies, sociology, literary studies, bibliography and the
history of ideas to coalesce as an academic discipline from the late 1970s.
Like political economy, book history insists upon the material under-
pinnings of conceptions of culture, focussing specifically on the mechanics
of print production, dissemination and reception. The field’s most
productive innovation from the perspective of revitalising adaptation
studies is its devising of various circuit-based models for conceptualising
the flow of print culture in host societies (Darnton, 1990; 2007; Adams
and Barker, 1993; Jordan and Patten, 1995). Specifically, these models of
interlinked authors, printers, publishers, retailers and the like maintain
18 Introduction
attention to the industrial and commercial substrata of the book trade,
but they integrate these concerns with attention also to less tangible intel-
lectual, social and cultural currents, demonstrating the interdependence
of the two spheres. Less compelling for the current purpose is that book
history – as its self-designation suggests – overwhelmingly confines its
attention to pre-twentieth-century print cultures, and has to date
generally failed to embrace the contemporary book industries as part of
its academic purview (Squires, 2007: 7; Murray, 2007a).

Cultural Theory
Compelling as is political economy’s materialist conceptualisation of con-
temporary media industries, on its own it provides an inadequate schema
for understanding the adaptation industry’s role in brokering cultural
value. In contemporary globalised media conglomerates, book publishing
is typically of relatively minor commercial significance in terms of its
contribution to overall corporate revenues. Yet publishing divisions con-
tinue to enjoy a high profile within such conglomerates as a source of
prestige and as ballast for corporate claims to cultural distinction. How
is it that book content is increasingly dematerialised from the book format
through digital technology and adaptation, while at the same time screen
industries attempt to leverage books’ associations of cultural prestige and
literary distinction across media platforms? On one hand, media indus-
tries would appear to be pursuing a culturally democratising agenda of
making acclaimed literary works available to demographically broader
screen audiences. But, at the same time, such industrial concerns allay
audience suspicions of commercial exploitation by constantly reiterating
film-makers’ respect for a content property’s prize-winning literary pedi-
gree. Thus cultural hierarchies are, paradoxically, kept alive by the same
industry that pushes audiences to consume near-identical content across
multiple media platforms.
Textually oriented cultural theory models are ill equipped to com-
prehend this nexus of commercial and cultural values at play in the
modern adaptation industry. This is principally attributable to the fact
that critical theory and cultural studies have tended to develop theories of
cultural value in relative isolation from the material industry contexts that
preoccupy both political economy and book history. Such disparate
critical foci have given rise to a disjunction between, on one hand, cultural
studies’ orthodox position of cultural relativism and, on the other, the
media industries’ avid support of cultural hierarchy as evidenced in their
marketing and publicity strategies emphasising consumer discrimination
and cultural self-improvement (Collins, 2002). Into this conceptual gap
this study imports Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production,
as Bourdieu was himself attempting to establish some middle ground
between traditional, Romantic-inflected art criticism’s deification of
 Introduction 19
individual genius, and the economic reductionism of crude Marxism,
whereby cultural products amount to nothing more than the mechanistic
working-out of their context of production (1993: 29–73). Especially
attractive in Bourdieu’s formulation is his focus on the role of various
cultural agents (individuals, groups or institutions) who maintain some
degree of willed decision-making within an overall context of a given
cultural field (29–30). Moreover, the tightly interdependent field is
itself constantly reformulated by the actions of these various agents as,
ecosystem-like, the introduction of a new agent or actions of existing
agents alter the functioning of the system as a whole.26 Apposite also for
a consideration of the adaptation industry, the field exists in a state of
‘permanent conflict’ (34): agents may form tactical alliances but these are
inevitably governed by self-interest and are hence inherently rivalrous and
unstable. Beyond this, the current book proposes, the adaptation industry
as a field possesses strong cultural memory in that the success of specific
adaptations for any nodal point in the network prompts imitative or
reactive behaviour in others. Given that this study examines specifically
contemporary literary adaptations, Bourdieu’s model of the field is
additionally compelling in its ability to hold together ‘economic profit’
and ‘symbolic profit’ as co-existing and circulating within – albeit often
conflictually – the same system (48). But Bourdieu’s positing of these two
forms of capital as inversely proportional in his ‘loser wins’ formulation
(i.e. the less successful an artwork is in market terms the more it
accumulates cultural esteem, and vice versa) appears of itself inadequate
to capture how markers of contemporary cultural esteem such as literary
prizes and film awards can have a phenomenal impact on the commercial
fortunes of such products, a concept examined in detail in Chapter 4’s
examination of (Man) Booker Prize screen adaptations (39).27
Thus the three methodologies outlined here could all already – hypo-
thetically speaking – have converged on the issue of the contemporary
adaptation industry, but have to date mostly failed to do so for reasons
of their own. This anomalous state of affairs cries out to be rectified. By
combining these three fields’ methodological insights, adaptation studies
stands to gain a new, intellectually invigorating methodology: alert to the
commercial and industrial structures of global media; wise to these
systems’ simultaneous invocation and disavowal of hierarchies of cultural
value; and capable of holding these two domains – the material and the
cultural – in dynamic relationship.

Modelling the Adaptation Industry

To begin with: an outline of the current book’s parameters and structure,
along with some provisos. This book’s conceptual framework for model-
ling what I term ‘the adaptation industry’ derives from the aforementioned
circuit models prominent in book history which chart the circulation and
20 Introduction
flow of print communications between various book industry stake-
holders.28 Substantially modifying such historically focussed models to
reflect the dynamics of contemporary English-language adaptation, this
book maps relationships between six key stakeholder groups: authors;
agents; publishers, writers’ and film festival directors; literary prize-judging
committees; screenwriters; and producers and distributors. Granted, this
may appear at first glance a resiliently dualist book–screen model of adap-
tation, especially given new-wave adaptation studies’ increased attention
to an expanded range of media formats: theatre, recorded music, comics,
graphic novels, computer gaming, animation, toys and myriad other
licensed commodities (Hutcheon, 2006; Leitch, 2007a).29 But to attempt
to chart the interlocking industrial relations of all these interests would be
tantamount to mapping the international creative industries as a whole;
such a task is clearly beyond the scope of any one project. Instead, I choose
the relationships between adaptation studies’ traditionally dominant (and
manifestly still prevalent) book and screen mediums as a manageably
delimited case study to demonstrate the potential of an innovative mate-
rialist and sociologically minded adaptation criticism. It is hoped that the
current volume clears sufficient methodological ground for others in turn
to detail the specific economies of adaptation between other mediums, in
both contemporary and historical periods.
One corollary of adapting circuit models from book history is an
awareness of the historical specificity of book industry structures. Any
mapping of the contemporary adaptation industry thus needs to take
account of aspects of the book trade which have become pervasive only
in recent decades. The timeframe for the current research is therefore circa
1980 to the present. This chosen period is broad enough to incorporate
significant structural, technological and cultural changes to the modern
book world: the growth of corporatisation and conglomeration from the
early 1980s; the revolutionary impact of digital technologies on all phases
of book production, distribution and retailing; the eclipse of the editor by
the agent as the author’s literary mentor and champion; the elevation of
book prizes in promotional campaigns by English-language publishers
(notably the (Man) Booker Prize); the creation of international book fair
and writers’ festival circuits; and the marked growth of ‘subsidiary’ rights
in non-book media as a feature of standard author–publisher contracts
during the period. The era also encompasses the boom years of ‘indie’
film-making as a significant niche within the mainstream cinema market,
with developments such as the growth of the Sundance Film Festival and
the rise of distributor Miramax marking out a distinct institutional circuit
for prestige contemporary literary adaptations.
Focussing industry-centred adaptation research on such a recent period
is designed as a corrective to adaptation studies’ long privileging of ‘classic’
Renaissance, eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century and Modernist texts
in its analyses (Giddings, Selby and Wensley, 1990; Lupack, 1999;
 Introduction 21
Cartmell, Hunter, Kaye and Whelehan, 2000; Mayer, 2002; Elliott, 2003;
Stam and Raengo, 2005). The much longer cultural histories of such texts
cause them to enter the contemporary adaptation economy already
freighted with critical approbation and/or notoriety. The exclusion of
already-established ‘classics’ from the proposed model ensures the pre-
existing cultural baggage of ‘classic’ texts does not distort the findings or
introduce variables that cannot be accounted for by the dynamics of the
contemporary adaptation industry itself. This being said, there is no reason
that the proposed materialist methodology should not also be applicable
to others’ studies of ‘classic’ text adaptations occurring in earlier eras of
the book, radio, film and television industries.
A mapping of the contemporary adaptations industry must also
acknowledge linguistic and geographic specificities. Overwhelmingly,
adaptation studies has, to date, focussed on English-language texts, or
upon film adaptations in languages other than English of Anglophone
‘classics’.30 This is one element of extant adaptation studies that I would
argue in favour of retaining, not for the sake of tradition itself, but
because it is important to recognise the variability of the adaptations
process across countries and regional language groupings. Hence, the
current study focusses upon content created, distributed and consumed
within the Anglophone world. The US and UK still account for the
overwhelming majority of the world’s English-language cultural pro-
duction. Yet there are clearly points of access into these global distri-
bution systems for content from historically ‘periphery’ English-language
cultures such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland
and – increasingly – India. That being said, typically if such second-tier
media-producing countries wish to gain exposure to global English-
language audiences for their content it is via collaboration with or
through acquiescence to US and UK cultural gatekeepers. Undertaking
detailed mapping of the contemporary adaptations industry thus not only
informs debates around cultural value, but also enhances formation and
implementation of cultural policy at national and supranational levels to
facilitate cultural ‘contra-flow’.

Chapter Outline
Chapter 1 explores the figure of the contemporary literary author, and
the way in which such authors increasingly serve as anchors for content
brands spanning multiple media. Chapter 2 examines the boom in the
rights business which makes possible legal adaptation of in-copyright
content, and specifically the figure increasingly functioning as gatekeeper
to such rights in fiction works – the literary agent. Where book contracts
transfer rights to a work from the author to the publishing house, pub-
lishers have a keen interest in wider circulation of such content. Chapter
3 examines three key fora at which publishers ‘shop’ book rights to other
22 Introduction
adaptations stakeholders, and market completed adaptations back to
bibliophilic audiences: book fairs, screen festivals and writers’ weeks. In
what ways, at these events and elsewhere, is the cachet of a prize-winning
book conveyed via adaptation? Taking as a case study screen adaptations
of (Man) Booker Prize-winning titles, Chapter 4 examines the screen
industries’ various attempts to signal literary prestige in non-print media.
Chapter 5 proceeds to examine that pivotal figure in adapting print
content to screen: the screenwriter. The complex and often fraught rela-
tionship of screenwriter to their adapted text – and its author – is a
recurrent theme of media discourse about screenwriting. But the recent
emergence of a handful of celebrity ‘auteur’ screen adapters, whose badge
is their assumed source-text ‘fidelity’, indicates both greater public
awareness of the adaptation process and a simultaneous effacement of
alterations made in the process of adapting. Weighted with financial
responsibility for the success of an esteemed novel’s screen adaptation,
film producers and distributors assiduously court approval of the literary
public sphere, as discussed in Chapter 6. Such strategies are designed to
transmute readers of the book into niche arthouse film supporters and,
through incubating of such esteem into film industry critical awards, to
ground an expanded publicity campaign for mass-market audiences. The
Weinstein brothers’ successes with the Miramax-style arthouse block-
buster are scrutinised for what they reveal about the marketing and
promotion of contemporary literary adaptations. Finally, the Afterword
considers emerging frontiers in literary adaptation, specifically the grey
area of unauthorised adaptations in the digital sphere, usually created by
fan audiences. While currently more common in relation to mass-market
and genre fiction, what do such intellectual property skirmishes indicate
about corporate media’s complex relationships with literature’s no longer
passive readers, but newly co-creating ‘users’?

Conclusion: Benefits of an Industry-centric Adaptation

Model
Critics have long remarked upon the prevalence of adaptation (Orr, 1992:
4; Naremore, 2000b: 15; Elliott, 2003: 4, 6; Hutcheon, 2004; 2006: xi,
2; 2007). Without question, the phenomenon of adaptation is steadily
becoming culturally ubiquitous. Yet missing from this academic equation
until very recently has been a production-oriented perspective to comple-
ment existing text- and audience-centric approaches. Analysing the
adaptation industry thus helps hybridise the now coalescing discipline of
adaptation studies’ governing methodology. However, rather than seeing
production-focussed analysis as merely a corrective to existing critical
imbalances and thus as an end in itself, the current book flags how
conceptualising the industrial substructures of adaptation provides new
understandings of which texts are commonly adapted, why they take the
 Introduction 23
specific forms they do, and how they influence or respond to audience
evaluation. Hence a focus on production issues in the digital age provides
a new dimension to adaptation research, but it at the same time calls into
question media studies’ traditional tripartite division into production/
text/audience categories. Production matters; but who the producers are
in an era of infinite digital reproducibility, collective creation and
‘produserly’ media practice remains an open question (Bruns, 2005).
Additional to these benefits accruing to the scholarly community in
general are the pay-offs such a study promises for the commonly mar-
ginalised discipline of print culture or publishing studies. Rather than
perceiving the book as the rapidly obsolescing poor cousin to ever-
burgeoning screen media, studying the adaptation industry reveals the
continuing prominence of book-derived content in the multimedia age.
This is true whether or not print formats serve as audiences’ initial point
of entry into a content franchise. For even a cursory glance at contem-
porary mainstream media culture reveals that audiences introduced to
book content in screen-media versions often subsequently consume the
same narratives in their original (graphic) novel format, or – particularly
where the content is original to screen – audiences may seek out novel-
isations, making-of books or companion volumes to prolong, enrich and
potentially complicate their immersive experience. Robert Stam’s briefly
elucidated concept of ‘post-celluloid’ adaptation is apposite here (Stam
and Raengo, 2005: 11). Although Stam’s use of the term appears to
denote the impact upon film culture of technological developments in
digital and online media, clearly digital content is also remediated into
resolutely analogue formats such as the book. Audiences demand, eval-
uate and sometimes ‘rewrite’ such cross-platform content in unpredictable
ways, disproving media historicists’ assumptions that younger audiences
are necessarily most loyal to more recently developed mediums.
Finally, the third constituency that stands to benefit from mapping of
the contemporary Anglophone adaptation economy is the book, film,
television, screenwriting and licensing sector practitioners who are
engaged in the actual mechanics of adaptation at the cultural coalface. To
date, such industry participants have been inadequately served: at one
extreme they have borne the brunt of critics’ suspicion of a money-hungry
and culturally rapacious ‘adaptation machine’ (as outlined earlier) or, at
the other extreme, they have been inadequately served by relentlessly
descriptive, rather than critical, ‘how to’ guides (Seger, 1992). For cultural
producers in second-tier or traditionally ‘periphery’ Anglophone nations,
it is especially crucial in cultural policy and cultural nationalist terms to
understand how content passes through (or bypasses) dominant US and
UK cultural networks to gain exposure to global English-language audi-
ences. What are the mechanisms by which content is brokered on the
global adaptation exchange, and what complex interplays of agents,
institutions and commerce inflect cultural evaluation across different
24 Introduction
territories? What specific industry phenomena trigger a rise or fall in
cultural prestige for authors, publishers and producers, for what reasons
and in the eyes of which audiences? Do adaptation industry agents always
benefit symbiotically from the multi-platform circulation of content, or
can a property’s rise to mass-market exposure in one media sector prompt
devaluation of a property’s cultural currency in another? After all, for
every reader who selects a tie-in edition on the basis of the familiar film
artwork reproduced on the cover, there are others who will actively seek
out a ‘purer’, more ‘literary’ pre-adaptation cover design (Marshall, 2003:
A1; Steiner, 2006; Sorensen, 2009: 21). To what extent are relationships
within the adaptation ecosystem mutually sustaining and to what extent
do they evidence sectoral rivalries, commercial conflicts and long-standing
prejudices about the cultural status of specific mediums? Such issues are
endlessly intellectually piquant, and unquestionably contemporary in
their relevance. Together they represent an exciting opportunity to help
shift adaptation studies from its lingeringly marginal status at the fringes
of literary and screen studies into perhaps the unifying discipline at the
centre of contemporary communication studies.
1 What Are You Working On?
The Expanding Role of
the Author in an Era of
Cross-media Adaptation

Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal

I’d still own the film rights and be working on the sequel.
(Elvis Costello, ‘Everyday I Write the Book’, 1983)

All great songs are written by great song-writing partnerships like Rodgers
and Hammerstein, and Lennon and McCartney, Strummer and Jones.
This is written by a combination of Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins.
—(Elvis Costello introducing ‘Everyday I Write the Book’
on UK Channel 4 TV show The Tube, November 1983)1

When confronted by the vast, industrialised, complexly interdependent

nature of the adaptation system as sketched in this book’s Introduction,
it is tempting to seek reassurance and intellectual certainty by returning
to the comfortingly familiar figure of the Author. Here, surely, is any
adaptation’s irrefutable point of origin – finite, individualised and con-
veniently open to interrogation – and hence the optimal starting point
for an intuitively humanist rather than bloodlessly systemic explanation
of the adaptation phenomenon. Such an impulse to consecrate the Author
as adaptation’s fountain-head fits easily with lingering Romantic concep-
tions of the Author as self-generative creative genius and truth-telling
sage to a debased and profit-hungry society – the quintessential artist
motivated by desire for posterity’s renown rather than by the sordidly
mercantile wrangling of Grub Street. Such author-centric conceptions
have, perhaps oddly, long remained particularly prevalent in the sphere
of adaptation studies.2 This is no doubt in part because of myriad adapted
literary authors’ disavowals of any financial or administrative interest
in the making of screen adaptations of their work. From their pub-
lished comments, it seems such authors prefer instead to follow Ernest
Hemingway’s famed advice to any literary author whose work was being
adapted:

the best way for a writer to deal with Hollywood [is] to arrange a
rendezvous with the movie men at the California state line: ‘you
26 The Expanding Role of the Author
throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump
into your car and drive like hell back to where you came from’.
(Phillips, 1980: 6; cited in Cordaiy, 2007: 35;
Donadio, 2007)3

An almost exact contemporary echo of this standard posture of authorial

disavowal is found in a recent article in the UK’s Observer newspaper
describing the typical role of authors in the making of screen adaptations
of their work: ‘Normally when an author works with a film-maker,
they just sign on the dotted line and then shake hands, before they are
told, “Thank you very much. See you at the premiere”’ (Thorpe, 2010).4
Thus patted patronisingly on the head, authors are thrown the table
scraps of artistic kudos before the entertainment machine gets down to
business.
Yet even this semi-facetious account of the hapless author’s brush-off –
‘See you at the premiere’ – should give us pause, indicating as it does that
the author’s role has not in fact ceased with the handing over of the book
and collecting of money but is, rather, incorporated into the highest profile
marketing event for any feature film: the celebrity-studded red-carpet
premiere. If authors are genuinely redundant to the adaptation economy,
as commonly averred by authors themselves, why habitually solicit their
involvement in such a film-centric event? The remark points up the fact
that contemporary literary authorship, far from standing outside the
adaptation economy, is in truth fundamentally a construct of that same
economy. Whether specific authors choose to conform fully to its linea-
ments or not, the role of contemporary authorship can only be understood
in the context of the book industry’s enmeshment, since the late decades
of the twentieth century, within a globalised and conglomerate-dominated
media landscape (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 83). In such a con-
verged system for producing and valorising the printed word, adaptation
can no longer be considered merely a serendipitous but unlikely after-
thought for a minority of already successful books. Rather, the possibility
of multipurposing any particular content package across myriad simul-
taneous media formats has come to underpin the structural logic of the
media industries and is consciously anticipated, stage-managed and pur-
sued at every stage of a book’s pre- and post-publication life (Murray,
2006; 2007b).
In such an environment, the author emerges as both the creative and
commercial anchorperson for content franchises based upon their work.
Commercially, authors (increasingly in collaboration with their agents, as
explored in Chapter 2) license and exploit the proliferating range of
primary and subsidiary rights spun out of book properties (Brouillette,
2007: 65; Squires, 2007: 25). While at the more abstractly cultural level,
authors function as creative spokespersons and aesthetic guarantors for
such trans-format media franchises – reassuring existing and potential
 The Expanding Role of the Author 27
audiences of an adaptation’s artistic bona fides. As this last point suggests,
these superficially distinct commercial and cultural roles are, in reality,
constantly blurring, as authorial imprimatur becomes itself part of the
marketing arsenal for a major-release film or big-budget television adap-
tation. The trend towards heavyweight literary authors being credited
as executive producers on screen adaptations of their works (explored
further in Chapter 4) encapsulates the convergent commercial and crea-
tive dynamics at play; such authors maintain significant leverage over
script and casting decisions, while often also negotiating a percentage of
the film’s profits in lieu of – or in addition to – their payment for film
rights. In many ways such a creative overseer role has, perhaps counter-
intuitively, proven easier for adapted literary fiction authors to cultivate
than for mass-market or genre fiction authors. Successive waves of
Arnoldian, Leavisite and New Critical approaches to the teaching of
literary fiction have deeply embedded (albeit often covertly) Romantic
conceptions of author–genius and inculcated a lingering distaste or even
(as outlined in the Introduction) a cultivated ignorance of the commercial
realities of the book trade.5 In such a public climate, it matters more to
film marketing and publicity what a Philip Roth thinks of the latest screen
adaptation of his work than a Dan Brown.
This rhetorically denied but latently enduring Romanticist under-
current in twentieth-century literary theory provides illuminating insight
into how, in the distinct but cognate field of adaptation studies, fidelity
criticism has been able to maintain such an obdurate hold. Serving no
production-related purpose, the ritual appearance of the author at the
adapted film’s premiere can only be explained by the authorial impri-
matur and creative blessing that the author presence is intended to bestow
upon the adapted text. That is to say, Romantic myths of semi-divine and
socially autonomous authorial genius are here being invoked by the
adaptation industry itself to disguise its own operations. The adaptation
industry by such means works insistently to cover its tracks – avidly
playing into the cult of the celebrity literary author for its own commer-
cial self-interest, but ever ready to point away from its own interventions.
It thus encourages audiences and critics to conceive of adaptation as a
process of dematerialised texts arising almost spontaneously from the
twin creative visionaries of Author and auteurist Director (cinema studies’
own Romanticist construct). Through such acts of strategic self-efface-
ment, the adaptation system manages, paradoxically, to reinscribe its
power – at its most pervasive when least perceived.
This chapter seeks to explore the neo-Romantic celebration of literary
authorship within the context of the contemporary Anglophone adapta-
tion industry. Its first part traces the various theories and constructions of
authorship dominant in the academy during this book’s focus period
of 1980 onwards, and seeks to explain how the mainstreaming of post-
structuralist theories of the ‘death of the author’ was able to occur
28 The Expanding Role of the Author
contemporaneously with the seemingly contradictory celebritisation of
literary authorship both in the culture broadly as well as – amazingly –
inside the academy itself. The chapter’s middle and third sections work to
ground these larger theoretical debates about the shifting nature of
authorship in the empirical realities of the adaptation industry, examining
the various ways in which the evolving ‘author function’ has left its
impress upon book industries’ rights management practices, and upon the
spheres of screen industry scriptwriting, marketing and publicity
(Foucault, 2006 [1969]: 284). Academic analyses reinforcing polarised
views of either an all-conquering cult of celebrity authorship, or of
authors sacrificed upon the altar of Hollywood profit-mongering fail to
do justice to the nuances and complexities of the author’s role in the
contemporary adaptation economy. As Bourdieu foresaw, authors still
work within a predetermined cultural field over whose characteristics they
have limited control, but the various strategic ‘plays’ they may make
within this given context allow them a significant degree of individual –
and collective – agency. The revival of the (never entirely dispelled)
Romantic sanctification of authorship has been avidly cultivated by an
adaptation industry whose very existence would – at first glance – seem
to disprove it. The anomaly confronting analysts of the contemporary
adaptation industry is that the drift towards author-centrism, the pro-
liferation of rights management regimes, and the global reach of con-
glomerate media should have proven so harmonious a blend.

Conceptualising Authorship
During the late decades of the twentieth century, three diverse modes for
conceptualising authorship were in the ascendant. These arose principally
from academic debates about the nature of authorship, but were energised
and popularised by contact with broader cultural currents. For the sake
of schematic simplicity, I have summarised them in what follows as,
respectively, the post-structuralist school of ‘the death of the author’,
book history’s recovery of the late-nineteenth- /early-twentieth-century
professionalisation of authorship, and cultural and media studies-inspired
analyses of the contemporary celebrity author. However, in practice much
overlap and multiple cross-currents exist between these three ostensibly
distinct schools, and some critical names attributed here to one school
could well find other aspects of their work as easily attributed to another
in a different context. Nevertheless, it is productive to untangle these three
distinctive theoretical and methodological threads from the tangled skein
of late-twentieth-century understandings of authorship as they constitute
the necessary intellectual background to the reconfiguring of the author’s
role in the contemporary adaptation economy which we are now wit-
nessing.
 The Expanding Role of the Author 29
The Death of the Author
Roland Barthes’ seminal and much anthologised essay ‘The Death of the
Author’ (1986 [1968]) deserves its prominent place in studies of author-
ship if only for its key analytical insight in prising apart the sociocultural
construct of the Author from the biological being who writes any given
literary work (49). By critically identifying the resultant sanctified Author
as the creation of regimes of culture and legal institutions, Barthes was
able to adumbrate how the figure of the Author has been invoked in
Western culture as a seemingly stable and individualised point of origin
for a text (49). In his suggestive – if frustratingly vague – formulations,
the invention of the Author serves ‘to impose a break’ on meaning (53).
This, Barthes alleges, has enabled the (French) literary-critical establish-
ment – his main target throughout the essay – to engage in a relentlessly
biographical form of criticism ‘tyrannically centred on the author, his
person, his history, his tastes, his passions’, all the while claiming to
bracket off the search for authorial intention as a critical fallacy (50). For
Barthes, this has had the deleterious effect of closing down the innate
polysemy of all literary texts in order to buttress the authority of literary
critics’ own orthodox readings. The overdue dethroning of this institu-
tionally created ‘Author-God’ is thus, for Barthes, the necessary first step
in celebrating instead ‘language itself’ and, through this manoeuvre, the
newly liberated reader (53, 50). Stripped of the anti-establishment revo-
lutionary rhetoric characteristic of the time and place in which the essay
was written, it is easy to perceive in retrospect that the liberation of the
ordinary reader could, in often the same institutional settings, slip easily
into the elevation of the Theorist as super-reader and surrogate hermeneu-
tic authority.
Frequently anthologised as a pair with Barthes’s essay, Michel Foucault’s
‘What is an Author?’ (2006 [1969]) has been labelled a ‘riposte’ to his con-
temporary (Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 81). Yet in truth Foucault
shares many of Barthes’ key tenets, in particular the idea that cleaving of
‘the author function’ from the biological writer constitutes an under-
girding principle of post-Gutenbergian hyper-individualised and capitalist
print culture (284). However, unlike Barthes’s quasi-mystical and notably
de-historicised prose, Foucault specifically links the rise of the Author to
the rise of ‘strict rules concerning authors’ rights, author-publisher rela-
tions, rights of reproduction, and related matters’, a link which has since
been empirically substantiated in much greater detail by book historians
and historians of ideas (285).6 For Foucault, the utility of the author
function within institutionalised literary criticism lies in its power to
classify, valorise and hierarchise a range of textual discourses, and thus
to provide the conceptual ordering system essential for sustaining any
academic discipline (especially, one might add, one with such shallow
institutional roots as non-Classical literary studies) (284; Biriotti and
30 The Expanding Role of the Author
Miller, 1993: 4). Invoking an originative Author permits critics to project
onto historical writers a singular creative ‘design’ or conveniently unified
psychology which can rationalise groupings of even formally diverse and
aesthetically uneven bodies of work (286). Like Barthes, Foucault is
highly attuned to the strategic disciplinary ends to which the usefully
protean author figure can be put. Buttressing the institutional positions
and consequent cultural authority of establishment literary critics, the
author function effectively ‘limits, excludes and chooses’ from amongst
the array of possible readerly interpretations of any instance of print
communication (290).
Re-encountering Barthes’ and Foucault’s essays not in an 1990s under-
graduate literary theory tutorial where I first read them, but from my
current perspective as a print culture and adaptation studies scholar, most
striking is their insistently dematerialised viewpoint. Both posit authors
almost solely as sites of hermeneutic and aesthetic confrontation between
literary critics, not as creative professionals with artistic and commercial
motivations of their own. In fact, from the exclusively Francophone and
predominantly historical examples scattered throughout both essays, it is
clear that Barthes and Foucault conceive of authors principally as both
dead and canonised, granting these theorists’ conceptual schemas limited
scope for understanding the deliberate self-fashioning of contemporary
literary authors. Also striking in revisiting these texts is the way in which
the atomised, liquid, ‘liberated’ textual polysemy both theorists celebrate
uncannily resembles the quite distinct way in which the largely stable and
unitary book of Gutenbergian print culture has fractured into a panoply
of intellectual property (IP) rights. The fact that these rights can be sold,
licensed or otherwise exploited by outside parties under ever-proliferating
IP regimes in the interests of profit generation and authorial image man-
agement fundamentally undercuts the pervasive anti-bourgeois, anti-
capitalist rhetoric of both essays.7 In the event, it was not so much
meaning that multiplied infinitely, but the legal regimes to prescribe and
control authorised use of book-derived content. Finally, Foucault foresaw
that the socially constructed role of the author function would continue
to modify along with its host culture, even predicting that ‘the author
function will disappear’ (291). Quite the contrary, it has been largely
through corralling the IP (intellectual property) rights arising from their
work, specifically through the hiring of literary agents, that authors
(admittedly the minority of the most critically and commercially suc-
cessful) have been able to firmly entrench their position in the creative
industries. From this newly powerful cultural vantage point, they have
been invited ceaselessly to pronounce upon the ‘correct’ interpretation of
their texts – this time not via the posthumous proxy of the ventriloquising
literary critic but in person through the expanding apparatus of the
celebrity-focussed media industries and a burgeoning ‘meet the author’
culture (Todd, 2006: 29).
 The Expanding Role of the Author 31
Professionalising Authorship
A second approach to conceptualising authorship, starkly opposed to
post-structuralist edicts, has also developed over the course of the last
30 years. Largely coalescing around the interdisciplinary academic field
known as the history of the book, such research takes a staunchly empiri-
cist (and often specifically bibliographical and archive-oriented) tack in
its quest to reconstruct the intermeshing material, legal and institutional
circumstances surrounding the rise of authorship as a profession in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the
twentieth. Although book history traces one line of its intellectual
genealogy back to French thought via the Annales school of social and
intellectual history, from its grafting onto the Anglophone academy from
around the mid 1970s book history often served as an empiricist refuge
from the high tide of post-structuralist-inspired abstraction then prevalent
across the Humanities. As commentators have noted, however, there is an
exquisite irony here (Price, 2002). For book historians’ investigations into
the construction of the professional author in practice raised many of the
same questions piquing followers of Barthes and Foucault: what is an
author?; to what extent is an author an autonomous creative force in
generating a text?; what obeisance is due to authors’ interpretations of
their own work?
Book historians have amply demonstrated that, in the context of the
centuries-long history of the post-Gutenberg West, a specific range of
forces began to converge in the late nineteenth century which proved
crucial in catalysing modern conceptions of the author. With the gradual
formalisation of enforceable international copyright in the wake of the
Berne Convention (1886), and with rising public literacy brought about
by universal primary education in Western democracies, writers began to
enjoy an expanding range of remunerative outlets for their creative work,
especially with the explosion of mass-circulation, advertising-supported
magazines towards the close of the nineteenth century. The concomitant
growth in foreign territory, translation and subsidiary rights clauses in
authors’ contracts with publishers, and the often punitive conditions these
forced upon authors because of their weak bargaining position, set the
stage for the emergence of the professional literary agent as author-
advocate, business manager and creative mentor (Hepburn, 1968; West,
1988a; 1988b; McDonald, 1997; Delany, 2002; Gillies, 2007). Given
these background developments in expanding markets for book-derived
content and securing of more favourable contractual terms, Modernist
writers without private incomes could, for perhaps the first time, make a
living (albeit a precarious one) by their pen (Holgate and Wilson-Fletcher,
1998). The literary sphere was witnessing the embryonic development
of the now familiar figure of the professional, organised, multiformat
author.
32 The Expanding Role of the Author
Academic book historians have not been alone in excavating this
largely obscured history of writers’ changing material and legal status.
Also emerging from the late nineteenth century were various professional
associations and authorial lobby groups created expressly to represent the
cause of the professional writer to parties both firmly within the literary
field (such as publishers, reviewers, booksellers and librarians) as well as
those predominantly outside of it (such as parliamentary committees, the
legal community and the general public): the UK’s Society of Authors
(1884) and Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (1959); the US Authors League
of America (1912, subsequently the Authors Guild (1921)) and the
Writers Guild of America (East and West) (1954); and the Australian
Society of Authors (1963) and Australian Writers’ Guild (1962) amongst
others.8 As part of their lobbying remit, such authorial trade unions have
produced important writer income surveys, guides to standard-form con-
tracts and submissions on book-related issues to various policy-making
bodies, all of which prove useful primary source material for those
seeking to trace the emergence of the professional author figure (Findlater,
1963; Klein, W., 1992; Pool, 2000; Australian Society of Authors, 2001;
Haylett Clark, 2008). Author societies have also thrown into high relief
specifically academic debates, disputing literary studies’ implicit presenta-
tion of literary history as a virtual baton race between individualised
canonical authors, all seemingly sui generis masters of their own literary
destinies. Works such as Victor Bonham-Carter’s two-volume history
of The Society of Authors, Authors by Profession (1978; 1984), insist
upon the valency of institutional and sociological approaches for under-
standing the changing literary sphere by positing authorial identity as
largely a collective creation fashioned by canny use of the various legal,
industrial and commercial tactics available at any time in the given field
of play.
With the richness of research resources abounding about the historical
professionalisation of authorship, it is all the more striking that a study
of the contemporary cross-platform author does not yet exist. There has
been, regrettably, an almost total lack of intellectual engagement between
post-structuralist strands of literary theory and the authors’ rights camp.
Nor can this be simply put down to their siting in different institutional
settings (one academic and one political–industrial). For from the 1980s
onwards, creative writing programmes (often taught by practising fiction
authors) proliferated in the same academic settings where ‘The Death of
the Author’ had begun to ossify into a theoretical truism. Book historians,
benefiting both from their position within the academy and their alertness
to the material and institutional specifics of the writing life, might have
been expected to form the bridge between these two wildly divergent and
largely disconnected understandings of authorship, and thus to begin to
theorise the particular characteristics of contemporary authorship in the
adaptation economy. To some extent this has occurred, as in James L.W.
 The Expanding Role of the Author 33
West III’s noting of the literary property’s fragmenting into a bundle of
adaptable IP rights by the dawn of the mass media era:

After the war . . . different ways of publishing one’s work, and adapt-
ing it to other media, began to emerge. . . . [S]tory material could be
adapted for presentation on the radio, stage, screen, or lecture circuit.
. . . The author set about tapping these new sources of income and
learning how to exploit the full earning potential of what was now
beginning to be called a ‘literary property’ .
(1988a: 113)

Yet, frustratingly, such productively systematising book history insights

almost invariably stop short of the second half of the twentieth century,
and thus cannot incorporate within their analyses the rise of conglomer-
ate media – and specifically digital media – which has transformed the
communications environment since the 1970s (Murphy, 2005: 204;
Murray, 2007a; Squires, 2007: 7). Granted, trade magazines and broad-
sheet journalism provide informative commentary and analysis about
specific developments in the adaptation economy (and are mined liberally
throughout the present volume as a result). But they tend, by their nature,
to be piecemeal, controversy-driven and only tangentially informed by or
engaged with broader developments in academic cultural theorising. The
upshot of these various intellectual disconnects is that we possess a rich
and empirically grounded narrative of authorship’s changing lineaments
from the Gutenberg era up until the birth of mass media. But how exactly
the now familiar print culture author figure might be reformulated – or
reformulate herself – in the era of conglomerate media and digitally
enabled remediation remains tantalisingly under-analysed.9

Celebrity Author Culture

Currently the most exciting body of work about the contemporary author
figure arises from the confluence of contemporary literary studies, cultural
theory, media studies and the emergent field of publishing studies. Such
analysts have taken as their central foci the marked rise of the celebrity
author as brand-name identity and the effect of such an ‘authorial econ-
omy’ on the workings of the book and creative industries more broadly
(Gardiner, 2008). Within the literary fiction sector of the book trade, as
much or perhaps even more so than in genre fiction sectors, the celebrity
author’s presence is ubiquitous, whether bundled into the paratext of the
book itself (author photographs, blurbs, bionotes), circulating in person
(at writers’ festivals, book fairs, author tours, in-store signings, politi-
cal protests) or virtually, via the media industries (newspaper profiles,
book reviewing, television chat-show appearances, radio interviews and
publishers’ websites) (Whiteside, 1981; Wernick, 1993; Look, 1999;
34 The Expanding Role of the Author
Gardiner, 2000a; 2000b; Moran, 2000; Donadio, 2005; Ommundsen,
2007; 2009; Squires, 2007; York, 2007; Rooney, 2009). Academic
analysts of the celebrity author phenomenon are alive to its relationship
to the broader twenty-first-century reconfiguration of news and enter-
tainment media around the figure of the celebrity, but are right to insist
that literary celebrity presents its own characteristics, manifests in speci-
fic ways and comes laden with a distinctive variety of cultural capital
(Moran, 2000: 4; Ommundsen, 2007: 249; York, 2007: 19–21). If we are
wanting to conceptualise how the figure of the author has modified as a
result of the accelerating adaptation economy of the present era, under-
standing the marketing of brand-name authors is essential.
A point of consensus for almost all writers on the culture of authorial
celebrity is that the figure of the author appeared, by the late twentieth
century, to be displaying, in Sarah Brouillette’s phrase, ‘something of an
identity crisis’ (2007: 11). Within the academy the author was routinely
and unlamentingly pronounced to be dead, yet within publishing, book
marketing, chain retailing and literary prize culture the brand names of a
select group of critically esteemed and commercially successful literary
fiction authors had never wielded more cultural clout (Wernick, 1993:
102; Gardiner, 2000a: 274; Moran, 2000: 58; Ommundsen, 2007: 247;
York, 2007: 3). Critic Maurice Biriotti, co-editor of a critical anthology
centred upon this very issue, What is an Author? (1993) (its title a direct
borrowing from Foucault), noted the particularly odd conjunction within
early-1990s literary academe of, on one hand, post-structuralist theory
and, on the other, the incursion upon traditional ideas of the canon by
various schools of identity politics: ‘ironically, just at the time when
different voices were being heard (black voices, women’s voices, the
voices of those in the margins), the Author’s death denied authorship
precisely to those who had only recently been empowered to claim it’ (6).
Amongst the most insightful critics puzzling over the simultaneous
death and miraculous revivification of the author figure is UK scholar Joe
Moran. Delving beneath superficial seeming contradiction, Moran reit-
erates that Foucault’s concept of the ‘author function’, as distinct from
the flesh and blood author, was always the construct of a specific set of
cultural circumstances. Hence, in the context of late-twentieth-century
media culture, the celebrity author is in fact only the latest and most
extreme incarnation of this long existent authorial persona. The celebrity
author’s neo-Romantic gloss does not, for Moran, make Foucault’s
analysis any less powerful; if anything it buttresses it. Most persuasive in
this context are arguments that the contemporary celebrity author is
specifically the creation of an age of media conglomeratisation, in which
the majority of leading publishing houses are subsidiaries within an
oligopoly of multi-sectoral transnational media corporations (Gardiner,
2000b: 65; Moran, 2000: 35; English and Frow, 2006: 41; Brouillette,
2007: 51). In such a setting, facilitating book publicity in affiliate radio,
 The Expanding Role of the Author 35
television and print periodical divisions is both comparatively straight-
forward and actively encouraged by voguish management philosophies of
corporate synergy (Moran, 2000: 39; Murray, 2005; English and Frow,
2006: 41; Squires, 2007: 24; Brouillette, 2007: 52).
Celebrity authors, at the centre of such feverish, corporate-endorsed
promotional activities, have not, however, simply passively acquiesced in
others’ construction of their own extra-literary fame. Analyses of literary
stardom by critics Joe Moran, Sarah Brouillette and Lorraine York are
structured around multiple chapter-length case studies of authors rang-
ing from John Updike and Kathy Acker (US authors composing
Moran’s selection) to Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee (post-colonial for
Brouillette), to Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje (Canadian for
York). These works analyse in detail how such figures have chafed under
celebrity culture’s tendency to invoke the author’s biography to validate
the alleged political or artistic ‘authenticity’ of their works. This mar-
keting tendency has triggered in such authors an array of self-reflexive
strategies for dissembling, parodying or generally complicating celebrity
culture’s effects – instances of ‘authorial self-articulation’ which aim to
jam the gears of readers’ over-easy conflation of biographical author with
their marketed persona, and perhaps also with the narrators or other
characters in their works (Brouillette, 2007: 62). The promotional shills
of the book trade may, these celebrity authors’ works seem to argue, be
ultimately inescapable given the book’s dual role as both communicative
act and tradable commodity. But any self-respecting literary chronicler of
post-modernity reserves the right to make sport with celebrity culture’s
more absurd tropes.
The problem with this lively and enticing field of celebrity authorship
from the perspective of adaptation studies is not its bold melding of
cultural theory, textual analysis and media studies, but rather that this
interdisciplinary bent is not pursued to its logical conclusion. It is widely
recognised that the authorial brand name works to transfer ‘promotional
capital’ to other books by the same author (as where standard-themed
covers are created for a celebrity author’s backlist reissues) as well as to
books by different authors (whether through the direct endorsement
of cover blurbs, or via the more diffuse halo effect of appearing on the
same publisher’s list, and thus reinforcing a house or imprint identity)
(Wernick, 1993: 93; Todd, 2006: 25, 32; Squires, 2007: 87). Equally,
celebrity author studies invariably discuss the use of the author’s appear-
ance and personality across television, newspaper and radio formats to
promote their books (Todd, 2006: 24, 28; York, 2007: 12). But what
the field has rarely to date examined is how celebrity author branding
attaches itself additionally to incarnations of this same book-derived
content in other media formats. The authorial appearance at a film’s
premiere endorses not only the value (cultural and economic) of the
adapted book, but is also designed to validate the broader franchise with
36 The Expanding Role of the Author
which the book is associated. It is as though the academic subfield of
celebrity author studies has been content to note the proliferation of
subsidiary rights in book properties, but has been insufficiently curious as
to where this licensed content ends up, and what role the author might
continue to play in shepherding it to public prominence.10
The contextual pressures upon authors to conceive of their creative
work as incipiently multiformat are present from the earliest phases of
content creation: pre-empted by the conglomerate owners of much of the
book publishing industry, itemised in the minutely detailed rights clauses
bulking out publishing contracts, and foremost in the business strategies
of their agent advisers.11 Given this, Juliet Gardiner is certainly correct in
stating that ‘the selling of a book has happened long before it reaches the
bookshop’ (2000b: 66). But a novel’s selling equally continues long after
its purchaser leaves that bookshop and perhaps adds the movie ticket, the
DVD or the licensed merchandising – a cross-media feedback process
evidenced by film tie-in cover designs, published screenplays, ‘making-of’
compendiums and souvenir companion volumes.12 The book is not the
final, definitive repository of a celebrity author’s identity (even if it is the
first such iteration). Rather, books constitute only one of a number of
potential media forms in which creative content can be embodied and
through which authorial celebrity can continue to circulate publicly and
replicate ad infinitum.

Authors in the Adaptation Economy

The three broad conceptual shifts in contemporary formulations of
authorship outlined above have played out primarily within the academy.
But, as intellectual movements, they drew argumentative force and empir-
ical ballast from changing formulations within the cultural industries;
conversely, key theoretical phrases such as Barthes’s ‘the death of the
author’ became commonly encountered (if less often understood) catch-
cries well beyond academe. In response to such circumstances, fiction
authors adopted various stances: some perceived in the changing linea-
ments of authorship an opportunity to elevate their status vis-à-vis other
book industry interests, whereas others (perhaps the majority) experi-
enced the changes in industry dynamics more passively, through the
shifting business practices of the book industries and their revised modes
and procedures for author liaison.

Book Rights: ‘Recognise that your Work is Multi-marketable!’13

The chief upshot of the book world’s increasing merger with the media
industries from the 1980s onwards is that parties to a contemporary book
contract no longer negotiate over a singularly conceived book, so much
as an IP rights bundle and potential content franchise. US literary and film
 The Expanding Role of the Author 37
agent Bill Contardi advises authors keen to keep pace with this key aspect
of the book industry’s thinking by understanding their work as ‘a branded
property’ (Baker, 2002: 27). The most direct evidence for this radical
conceptual shift lies in the ballooning rights clauses contained in standard
commercial book publishing contracts which itemise the exact division
between author and publisher of rights to book content in every con-
ceivable form. These expand in concentric circles outwards from the
familiar codex format of the book: the primary rights regarding edition
formats and royalties payments for publication in the home market;
secondary or ‘subsidiary’ foreign territory and translation rights; digital
and e-book reproduction rights; so-called ‘dramatic rights’ covering
film, television, stage and radio adaptation (and almost always tying into
these potentially lucrative merchandising rights)14 and what might now
be called ‘true’ subsidiary rights such as those governing serial, audio-
book, condensation, anthology and book-club agreements (Owen, 1992;
Jefferis, 1995; Bide, 1999; Thornton, 2000; Lurie, 2002; Marcus, 2003;
Beck, 2005; Zimon, 2006). New, or newly significant, categories of sub-
sidiary rights are also proliferating in line with developments in media
technologies and audiences’ consumption patterns: novelisation, com-
puter gaming, graphic novel (aka ‘picturisation’) and animation rights are
increasingly common.15 Rights deals may even break down an individual
literary property into specific, transferable sub-properties of ever more
fissiparous nature: rights to the storyline; character(s); individual chap-
ters; and sequel and prequel rights (‘So Somebody’, 1982; Owen, 1992;
Baker, 2002; Edwards, 2004; Davies, 2005; Langer, 2005, Masters,
2006; Raftos, 2008; Inglis, 2008).16
Publishers’ logic here is that if author contracts include the maximum
tranche of rights, the publisher is guaranteed a percentage of any income
derived from sale of those rights (typically a 50 per cent cut, although this
varies significantly depending upon the rights category) (Lurie, 2002: 14).
As Penguin Australia Rights and Contracts Manager Peg McColl articu-
lated it in an industry seminar, publishers’ golden rule is to ‘buy widely,
license narrowly’ (Australian Publishers Association, 2009).17 Whether
the pan-format synergistic nirvana envisaged by corporate management
strategists ever actually eventuates for a given property is not publishers’
key consideration here. The object of the exercise is to secure contractual
rights over all potential incarnations of a book’s content prospectively
and, it should be added, defensively because of the industry wisdom that
‘in publishing, you never know when a property will become valuable’
(Reid, 2000c: 14).
But in seeking to acquire book rights so aggressively and often without
increased payment to authors, publishers face opposition not only in the
form of authors’ professional societies and literary agents, but also from
the still nationally based nature of most publishing operations, even
within multinational organisations (Murray, 2007c). Publishers wishing
38 The Expanding Role of the Author
to acquire broad rights in a property must weigh the potential commercial
benefit against the possibility that local publishers in a foreign territory,
or a foreign sub-agent contracted by the author’s literary agent, may
better appreciate the nuances of local markets and could thus enhance the
brand-name reputation of the author in that market, thus benefiting all
concerned (Raftos, 2008;Tranter , 2008; Harwood, 2008; Australian
Publishers Association, 2009).18 Granted, publishers contracting broadly
with authors could conceivably later sub-license specified rights to local
operatives, but it becomes an issue of a publisher’s in-house skills,
international contracts and interest level in negotiating a raft of such
potentially time-consuming rights agreements. What these various legal,
institutional and commercial changes represent, in concert, is what one
publishing commentator has termed the ‘Swiss Army-knife’ nature of
content in the twenty-first century (Thornton, 2000: 86).19 The book
format is increasingly envisaged as only a temporary vessel for ‘liquid’
content, which may be decanted and reconstituted across the full gamut
of contemporary media platforms (Murray, 2003a; Booth and Hayes,
2005).
Conceptualising their work as a bundle of transferable IP rights repre-
sents a major conceptual shift for most literary fiction authors socialised
into their profession along determinedly aestheticist, logophilic lines
(Petrikin, 1997c; Cook, 2000). Yet, considering that the fee for purchas-
ing film rights is commonly 1–3 per cent of a film’s total budget, the
potential revenue for an author from film rights sales – or even multiply
renewed options agreements – can be substantial, and probably much
larger than any advance the author may have received from the publisher
(Bradley, 2005). It is here that the figure of the literary agent enters the
picture.20 For the transformation of the concept of the book, and of the
role of the author, has occurred simultaneously with the rise of the literary
agent in the publishing firmament.
It was in the 1980s that the literary agent became an essential figure –
rather than an optional extra – in the creative writer’s professional life
(Bonn, 1999; Epstein, 2001; Rolley, 2005). Viewed from a macro-level
industrial perspective, the growth of literary agencies was in direct pro-
portion to the increasing conglomeration of publishing from the late
1970s onwards (Lurie, 1999). Economic rationalist managerial regimes
put pressure on editorial budgets, leading to higher turnover of editorial
staff and to outsourcing of many structural and line-editing functions
(Hart, 1984; Lurie, 1999; 2001; Cook, 2000; Schiffrin, 2001; Phillips et
al., 2005; Rolley, 2005). As a frontlist-driven bestseller mentality came to
dominate within publishing conglomerates, it became a matter of pro-
fessional survival for midlist fiction authors to secure optimal contractual
terms (preferably for more than one book) at their first attempt. For if an
author’s first novel failed to sell strongly, they would be unlikely to be
contracted for another (Curtis, 1984;Hart, 1984; Lurie, 2001; McPhee ,
 The Expanding Role of the Author 39
2001). With harried and poorly paid editors preoccupied by a lack of job
security and shackled to the treadmill of searching for ‘the next big thing’,
long-term author-nurturing fell decidedly by the wayside at most multi-
national houses (Holgate and Wilson-Fletcher, 1998).
Such contextual developments perfectly suited the burgeoning literary
agencies. With many publishers no longer accepting unsolicited manu-
scripts, literary agents were able to promote themselves to publishers as a
time- and labour-saving quality-control mechanism, filtering author
submissions, and matchmaking individual manuscripts with appropriate
publishers’ lists (Hart, 1984; Greenfield, 1989; Cook, 2000; Lurie, 2001;
Beck, 2005; Rolley, 2005). Literary agents’ role has steadily expanded to
include the promotional task of preparing a first-time author’s ‘platform’
to the industry in order to ‘break[. . .] out new writers’, the hard bar-
gaining of negotiating contractual terms, and – a task critical to the
functioning of the adaptation economy – ongoing legal and commercial
management of an author’s IP rights across all relevant media platforms
(Beck, 2005: 57; Lurie, 2002: 12; Hart, 1984; Greenfield, 1989; Marcus,
2003). Bearing in mind that an agent’s standard fee is a 12.5–15 per cent
commission rate, it is readily apparent why it is in an agent’s professional
interest to ensure that all rights in a literary property are carefully
accounted for, and that licensees are actively exploiting rights rather than
simply stockpiling them (Petrikin, 1997a; Lurie, 2002; Aprhys, 2003).21
As legendary New York City literary agent Andrew Wylie encapsulates
the agent’s rule of thumb, a literary right unexploited is effectively an
interest squandered: ‘limit the license and push up the fees. That’s what
it’s all about’ (Arnold, 2000: E3).
For this reason, major international book fairs, including Frankfurt,
London, Book Expo America, Bologna (for children’s books) and
Guadalajara, Mexico (for the Spanish-language book market), include
dedicated fora where publishers, agents and producers schedule full days
of back-to-back meetings in order to pitch titles which may translate well
to non-book formats (as analysed in detail in Chapter 3) (Marcus, 2003).
Additionally, Monaco has in recent years hosted the annual Forum
International Cinéma et Littérature dedicated solely to book-screen
rights-trading,22 while film festivals and writers’ weeks internationally
increasingly incorporate invitation-only industry events designed to bring
representatives of the book and screen worlds together to catalyse
adaptations deals (Rickett, 2006; George, 2007).
The most recent entrant into the adaptation field is the figure of the
scout, increasingly the ‘first step in the book-to-film development process’
and hence a player wielding ‘incredible influence over aspiring writers and
the outcome of literary properties’ (Petrikin, 1998b: 1; Fleming, 1995b).
Prevalent since the 1980s, the scout’s role bears close resemblance to that
of the agent (and hence there is much professional traffic – and rivalry –
between the two sectors) in that foreign rights scouts identify and write
40 The Expanding Role of the Author
synopses of notable titles as a preferential early-alerting service for
overseas publishing clients keen to steal a march on their competitors
(Franklin, 2002).23 A second subgroup of scouts locates ‘film-ready lit. . .
projects’ for studios or for name producers, directors or stars with
sufficient industry clout to green-light an adaptation project through the
cachet of their ‘attachment’ (Fleming, 1995b: 58; 1995a; Petrikin, 1998b;
Quinn, 1999; Maas, 2001).24 Scouts typically conduct their business on
a retainer basis, and so make it a professional priority to know the content
preferences and artistic predilections of those engaging their services
(Petrikin, 1998b). Because the market value of rights in a ‘hot’ book
property is entirely a function of the adaptation economy’s forces of
supply and demand, instigation and fanning of inter-industry ‘buzz’ or
‘heat’ is crucial (Bing, 2000: 9). Scouts’ attempts to pre-empt later bidders
by granting preferential early access to promisingly adaptable properties
on a ‘first-look’ basis has led to a slew of industry accusations about
scouts circulating ‘slipped’ book properties (that is, manuscripts surrep-
titiously copied within publishing houses, presumably by lowly paid
editorial staff, or proof or advance review copies passed to film personnel,
often in defiance of stern prohibitions on the cover) (Quinn, 1996: 23;
Bing, 2000: 129; Maas, 2001: 25; Lazarus, 2005: 4–5). No doubt with
the advent of PDF proofs it has become even easier and less conspicuous
to leak pre-press copies. This practice of ‘slipping’ has been roundly con-
demned by (some) publishers, agents and authors because a haphazard or
substandard pitch of leaked material could jeopardise an intended and
painstakingly coordinated official showcasing of the property (Petrikin,
1998b).25 This then risks saddling it with a poor first impression and
shop-soiled familiarity, hence damaging its future value in the adaptation
marketplace. Further complicating matters, however, some promisingly
adaptable manuscripts or proposals are deliberately ‘leaked’ by publishers
or agents – a process known as a ‘slip-slip’ – to stoke film industry
recipients’ level of interest by contriving a commercially beneficial air of
notoriety or the added allure of the contraband (Maas, 2001: 25).26
The power of the scout has made itself keenly felt in one of the most
striking examples of the book and screen industries merging under the
force of the adaptation economy: the proliferation of ‘pre-publishing film
sales’ in recent decades (Petrikin, 1997b: 1; 1997a; 1997c; 1998b). This
is a tactic of circulating a still-under-consideration or pre-publication
manuscript to screen producers to secure interest in adapting it, the better
to maximise the author’s bargaining power in subsequent contractual
negotiations with publishers (Maas, 2001; Jinman, 2004; Cordaiy, 2007;
Raftos, 2008). The rationale is that a property having been optioned ‘says
to the sales reps and buyers and bookstores, “This must be commercial,
because they want to make a movie of it!”. So perhaps the sell-in [by
publishers to retailers] ends up being a little more enthusiastic and better’
(Langer, 2005).27 Predictably, this promotional tactic succeeds best with
 The Expanding Role of the Author 41
established ‘brand-name’ authors whose screen rights may be sold on the
basis of a still incomplete manuscript, even as little as a single-page syn-
opsis or, in exceptional circumstances, a title alone (Fleming, 1995a;
Sullivan, 2002).28 But it can occasionally also work for unknowns: in
1994 first-time British novelist (and former screenwriter) Nicholas Evans’
(still incomplete) manuscript The Horse Whisperer (1995) was famously
optioned for US$3 million by Robert Redford and Hollywood Pictures
prior to publication – gaining Evans veritable folk hero status and no
small amount of envy amongst starving-in-a-garret creative writing
students the world over (Nathan, 1994; Fleming, 1995a; Quinn, 1999;
Raftos, 2008).

The Multiple Lives of the Author: ‘Author as Commodity’29

As the above developments attest, twenty-first-century authorship is no
longer a single-medium (or even print-specific) role. In an adaptation
economy characterised by media conglomeration, increasingly elaborate
legal regimes for the ownership and licensing of content, and agents
whose livelihoods depend upon the maximum cross-format exposure of
clients’ creative work, contemporary authors have scented the wind and
adapted their professional behaviours accordingly. In the academy,
meanwhile, the field of adaptation studies has by now thoroughly digested
the fact that a book does not necessarily predate a screen incarnation of
the same content, but may in fact be derived from screen products (as
outlined in this volume’s Introduction). This has for some time amounted
to a truism in regard to writings about popular culture, where comics,
computer games and television series are increasingly mined source
material for feature films. But it is now – more surprisingly – becoming
true also in the sphere of literary fiction. The flourishing of Hollywood
studios’ specialist divisions for more experimental fare, coupled with the
rise of the ‘smart’ film genre (of which Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is a
quintessential example), and the concomitant rise of HBO-style, high-
production-value, long-format ‘quality television’ has meant that intel-
lectually demanding, playfully intertextual, creatively nuanced content of
the kind long associated with highbrow B-format fiction may now just as
readily begin its life on the screen, or be incubated in print and screen
formats simultaneously (Sconce, 2002; Biskind, 2004; McCabe and
Akass, 2007).

Author as Screenwriter
Hollywood’s pejorative view of the stereotypical literary author was
formerly that of a necessary, albeit tiresome, source of adaptable material:
novelists’ individualist work ethos and anti-commercial preciousness too
often reduced them to ‘those pesky people who . . . make us waste
42 The Expanding Role of the Author
$100,000 writing the first draft before we get a professional to take care
of it’ (Donadio, 2007). Perhaps in the wake of first-year undergraduates
now being exposed to film studies courses at the same time as they take
introductory literature units, such medium hierarchies appear to be
becoming outmoded amongst content creators by a process of genera-
tional churn. Indeed, the book and screen industries are increasingly
witnessing the phenomenon of twin-track authorship, whereby a writer
works simultaneously on book and screenplay versions of a story with the
intention of pursuing whichever is contracted first, and then converting
the cultural and financial capital secured in one industry into enhanced
bargaining power in the other (or, potentially, others).30 Certainly this
puts an innovative spin on the question writers are forever asking each
other: ‘What are you working on?’ The dual book/screen tactic has a
decades-long history, dating back at least as far as the sentimental block-
buster Love Story (1970), Erich Segal’s ‘shopped-around screenplay[ ]
that got nowhere’ until an agent ‘suggested the writer turn it into a novel,
which, when published, could be submitted anew and then bought as a
movie’ (Holt, 1979: 136; Wyatt, 1994: 149; Price, 2010: 107).31 Such a
seemingly schizophrenic creative practice has proven remarkably suc-
cessful in more recent times for US author Rex Pickett.32 Pickett wrote
Sideways, his semi-autobiographical tale of mid-life disillusionment, male
friendship and Californian wine tasting, as both a novel and screenplay.
The manuscript was rejected by 15 publishers, before independent film
director Alexander Payne, who was represented by the same agency,
chanced to read it and optioned it in 1999. Pickett then reapproached
publishers with evidence of Payne’s interest and St. Martin’s Press bought
the book in February 2003 for a US$5000 advance, publishing it in June
2004 (Burkeman, 2005). Fox Searchlight (Fox’s arthouse specialist
division) had in the interim greenlit Payne’s film, releasing it only months
afterwards in October 2004. Profuse critical acclaim for Sideways,
culminating in five Academy Award nominations, successfully cross-
promoted the book (promptly repackaged in a tie-in edition with film-art
cover design). The promotional push accelerated with the Oscar win for
Payne’s co-written screenplay, which was in December 2004 itself
published by screenplay specialist imprint Newmarket Press in film-
themed livery. With Sideways’ brand value now firmly established, further
adaptations and tie-ins proliferated, including The Sideways Guide to
Wine and Life (2005), a self-described ‘pocket-sized illustrated guide to
the locations and wines featured in Sideways’, CD, cassette and dis-
posable ‘Playaway’ audiobook versions (2005; 2005; 2009), and CDs of
the film’s soundtrack (2005).33 All this led Pickett, not without justifica-
tion, to crow: ‘I have summited the adaptation Everest!’ (Kung, 2004;
Burkeman, 2005; Pemberton, 2005).
The intervention of Payne – arthouse, auteurish director of offbeat,
wryly intelligent fare for discerning, niche audiences – had already proven
 The Expanding Role of the Author 43
crucial for another twin-track author. US novelist Tom Perrotta wrote a
manuscript, Election, which remained unpublished until being optioned
for film adaptation by Payne. Familiarly, Perrotta parlayed Payne’s
demonstrated belief in the value of the material into a book publishing
contract, with the published novel (1998) subsequently piggybacking
on the critical success of Payne’s break-through feature film (1999).
Perrotta’s later novel, Little Children (2004), was also adapted for the
screen, this time by arthouse director Todd Field (2006). The two collab-
orated on the Academy Award-nominated screenplay, itself published by,
once again, Newmarket Press (2007) (Donadio, 2007).34
The constellation of such cross-format examples around a single
writer–director serves as a microcosmic instance of larger shifts within the
adaptation economy. Simply put: content branding now generates greater
audience loyalty than does media format. Mainstream audiences have
come to self-identify not so much as booklovers or cineastes (demonis-
ing one medium to reinforce their association with another, valorised
medium, as may previously have been the case, especially in the decades
before the post-television proliferation of communication platforms
made such either–or judgements manifestly archaic); rather, audiences’
behaviours mark them as enthusiasts for highly specific sub-genres of
content – avid consumers willing to pursue their tastes across media in
format-agnostic manner. In such a context, the specific medium in which
a successful property first appears matters less than the scale of that
success and the potency of the brand–audience attachment it generates
(Murray, 2005). That authors are rising to meet the occasion represents,
at one level, the logical culmination of book contracts’ and authors’
professional associations’ now routine encouragement for writers to
conceptualise their creative work as innately ‘multi-marketable’. In the
above examples, it is not so much a case of the publisher ‘buying widely
and licensing narrowly’, as of the author strategically playing the various
media sectors off against each other, the better to build a trans-sectoral
content franchise. Much as conglomerate management might prefer to
keep all incarnations of a prized property under a single corporate roof,
to be synergistically exploited and cross-promoted by its various affiliate
media divisions, here it is more commonly the author and their business
strategist-cum-agent cannily parcelling up rights to specific incarnations
of the media brand. It illustrates that, a century after the first emer-
gence of the ‘professional’ author figure from the coalescing post-Berne
Convention rights economy, a new generation of writers is seeking to turn
the massifying logics of the adaptation field to their cultural and com-
mercial advantage.
44 The Expanding Role of the Author
Author as Actor
In the above-mentioned film adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel Little
Children, the author makes an intradiegetic appearance credited as ‘Small
Man’.35 This further evidence of how closely the careers and public per-
sonae of twenty-first-century literary authors are bound into adaptations
of their work has lengthy historical precedents. The 1920s middlebrow
British author Elinor Glyn – coiner of the phrase ‘It Girl’ and chronicler
of the Modern era’s invention of celebrity culture – regularly made cameo
appearances as herself in early film versions of her novels (Weedon,
2008).36 Analysts of contemporary celebrity author culture James F.
English and John Frow note the continuation of this trend in the form of
‘brand-name’ authors appearing as themselves in major films, most likely
thinking of quintessential celebrity author Salman Rushdie’s uncredited
book-launch-party cameo in the first Bridget Jones’s Diary film (2001)
(2006: 42).37 Existing as yet at the periphery of critical attention, how-
ever, is a subtler brand of authorial cameos in adapted films and televi-
sion series: those in which the author is granted a non-speaking, usually
incidental walk-on role as an anonymous character. Recent examples of
the trend include British novelist Zadie Smith appearing as an extra in a
crowd scene in Channel 4’s miniseries (2002) of her award-winning novel
White Teeth (2000);38 Michael Cunningham’s walk-on role in The Hours
(2002) in the very Mrs Dalloway-ish context of ‘Man Outside Flower
Shop’;39 British historical novelist Sarah Waters’s appearance in two BBC
miniseries adapted from her works Tipping the Velvet (1998; 2002) and
Fingersmith (2002; 2005) (in the latter as a maid); Russell Banks’s role as
‘Dr Robeson’ in The Sweet Hereafter (1997);40 John Irving’s cameos as
‘Stationmaster’ and ‘Referee’ in, respectively, The Cider House Rules
(1999)41 and The World According to Garp (1982)42; and Australian
author Luke Davies’s symbolically laden appearance as a milkman prof-
fering some human kindness to the chaotic junkies in the film version of
his novel Candy (1998; 2006) (Goldstein, 2006).43 Pulitzer prize-winning
author Geraldine Brooks has gone on record as saying that when her
seventeenth-century-set plague novel Year of Wonders (2002) is adapted
for film she wants ‘to play a poxy corpse on a death cart’ (Wyndham,
2005a; 2005b: 8).44
Beyond the one-up smugness that such neo-Hitchcockian touches ignite
in the more trainspottery reaches of film and literary studies academe
(from which I’m not exempting myself here), authorial cameos serve the
adaptation economy in multiple ways. For authors, it represents a chance
for the usually solitary, housebound, intensely interiorised author to
partake in the animated buzz and collaborative enterprise of screen pro-
duction, a process that has tended historically to marginalise the author
as potentially overly possessive and interfering. As Deborah Moggach
reflects on her cameo appearance as ‘Woman on Bridge’ in her five-part
 The Expanding Role of the Author 45
television adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (2009), and her
planned cameo in Tulip Fever:

It’s fun! You want to put your little, tiny stamp on it – you want to
be involved; you want to be one of the gang. The thing is that once it
starts shooting your job is over and nobody knows who you are;
you’re welcomed on set politely but you haven’t got any place there
and you sort of just hang about. But if you’re an extra you’re involved
in the process.
(Moggach, 2008)45

The cameo appearance’s potential to provide hooks for celebrity–author

newspaper interviews and profile pieces is not only gratifying for autho-
rial egos but, more substantially, valuable for the promotion and publicity
apparatus of the adaptation industry itself. Public alertness to an author’s
cameo role bestows authorial imprimatur upon a screen adaptation – a
writerly benediction especially important where fan readerships are
restive about the possible travestying of a beloved book by the Hollywood
machine. UK literary and screen agent Julian Friedmann even observes
a growing trend to include in film rights contracts a clause stipulating
that the author will refrain from negative publicity about the adaptation
(‘Book’, 2009). A Romantic conception of the author as originating
genius and creative overseer is here reified by an industrial process that
would seem, on its face, to contradict it. Indeed, the two processes ought,
logically, to cancel each other out completely. Nevertheless, sacralisation
of the literary author and the commercial and publicity functions of the
adaptation industry manifestly coexist, seeming to stoke each other in a
symbiotic relationship. This paradox of simultaneous authorial elevation
and putting the authorial persona to work for the commercial benefit of
the industrially produced entertainment commodity illuminates why
fidelity-based evaluations remain so intuitive for much of the film-going
public, and so habitual for many adaptations scholars, despite their best
attempts at theoretical disavowal. The genius of the adaptation industry’s
workings is this mastery of self-effacement: the very textual phenomena
that ought to point our critical gaze outwards towards the industrial
dimensions of adaptation here disingenuously point once again back
to the soothingly familiar figure of the creatively fecund, aesthetically
uncompromised, splendidly solitary author.

Author as Promoter
To tease out some of the more extreme implications of the twenty-first-
century literary author’s expanded role as brand ambassador and adap-
tation promoter, I want to return to contemporary adaptation studies’
46 The Expanding Role of the Author
veritable favourite film: Spike Jonze’s Adaptation. The playfully self-
reflexive and exuberantly metafictional aspects of Adaptation have so
entranced textually oriented postmodernist critics that they have, per-
haps, distracted them from an equally intriguing aspect of the film – the
role in and around it played by author Susan Orlean. At one level an
adaptation of Orlean’s bestselling book The Orchid Thief (itself expanded
from her sprawling New Yorker article on the same topic), Adaptation
was to have featured Orlean in a cameo as ‘Woman in Supermarket’ (a
scene deleted from the film’s final cut) (Goldstein, 2006).46 Producer
Edward Saxon optioned both Orlean’s magazine article and book, and he
and Jonze encouraged an initially reluctant Orlean to allow use of her
name in the film script itself (Boxer, 2002; Younge, 2003; Murray and
Topel, n.d). This was both a necessary and sensitive negotiation, because
Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay includes an entire subplot based around
Orlean’s experiences researching and writing her article/book, and
because Meryl Streep’s character takes such outrageous liberties in por-
traying Orlean as a drug-taking, gun-toting adulteress and amateur
pornographer. Columbia Pictures further insisted on Orlean signing over
to them life rights in the ‘Susan Orlean’ character so as to prevent either
Orlean suing for defamation or any other studio producing ‘unauthorised’
sequels or prequels (Bing, 2002: 70). (In an equally fascinating twist,
Columbia also sought ‘sequelisation’ rights to the ‘Charlie Kaufman’
character, but Kaufman’s lawyers refused to grant them – a discrepancy
that may speak to the relative status of authors and screenwriters gener-
ally, or of Orlean and Kaufman specifically, in contemporary Hollywood
(Bing, 2002: 70).) Orlean’s request that the film retain her book’s title –
with an eye, understandably, to the typical sales fillip enjoyed by tie-in
editions – was over-ruled by the producers, but Orlean was (at least
publicly) mollified that ‘the title of the book is mentioned over and over
in the film, and the [US hardback] book cover is shown’ (Seiler, 2003;
Murray and Topel, n.d.). Despite what Orlean has summarised as ‘a
whole lot of legal issues’ surrounding her involvement with the film, she
has walked the red carpet at film award ceremonies, made pre-screening
special appearances, written a Foreword to the US published version of
the shooting script, and has spoken enthusiastically and with appropri-
ately self-mocking irony about her whole adaptation experience in numer-
ous media profiles (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002; Griffin, 2002; Kahn,
2002; Seiler, 2003; Younge, 2003). The appositely named Adaptation
represents perhaps the logical end point of the contemporary literary
author’s increasing absorption into the adaptation economy, not only as
a provider of adapted source material, but as potential screenwriter,
actor, promoter and general brand spokesperson. This radically expanded
version of Foucault’s author function has become so culturally ubiquitous
and commercially serviceable that, in the constantly converging realm
of the modern media, it becomes increasingly futile to try to discern
 The Expanding Role of the Author 47
where the previously distinct entities of ‘author’, ‘book’ and ‘film’ begin
or end.

The Anti-adaptation Author

In his study Star Authors, Joe Moran pays particular attention to

legendary ‘author recluses’ such as J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon,
whose adamantine rejection of the usual mores of celebrity authorship
has, paradoxically, made them cult figures of literary folklore (2000: 54).
Decades-old yearbook photographs, rumoured sightings, and tales of
near-encounters here become grist for the mill of celebrity author-hunting
broadsheet journalists, as these particular authors’ anti-publicity stance
morphs into the perfect hook for new book coverage. In similar manner,
the phenomenon of the anti-adaptation author – a literary author who
trenchantly refuses to sell the film rights to a bestselling novel – enjoys a
complex relationship to the adaptation economy as a whole. At one level,
such authors serve as exceptions that prove the rule – throwing into high
relief the norm of authors avidly soliciting and participating in screen
adaptations of their work. But at a deeper level, the anti-adaptation
author and the posture of literary ‘purism’ for which she becomes a figure-
head has, with remarkable ease, been put to work for the adaptation
industry’s own ends.
Three notable authors, from diverse parts of the globe, are most readily
identified with the anti-adaptation position. Though the novels in ques-
tion were originally written in three different languages, it is significant
that all became massive literary bestsellers in English (in two cases via
translation) and thereby attracted the fervent interest of Hollywood
producers. Gabriel García Márquez, luminary of the South American
magical realist tradition, long refused to sell the film rights to his novel
Love in the Time of Cholera (1985; English trans. 1988), a position attri-
buted to his long-standing and vocal opposition to US cultural imperial-
ism, particularly in Central and South America. Similarly, German
novelist Patrick Süskind’s bestseller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
(1985; English trans. 1986) aroused great interest from screen producers
eager to transfer its panorama of eighteenth-century European urban life
to screen, despite the novel’s seemingly un-cinematic central concern with
the sense of smell. Significantly, Süskind’s resistance to Hollywood’s
many blandishments has been ascribed to his rejection of precisely the
kind of promotional rounds authors of adapted novels are now routinely
expected to make:

The real reason behind Süskind’s refusal to sell the film rights to his
novel was that he was completely averse to the kind of publicity other
successful young authors normally crave, publicity that entails being
48 The Expanding Role of the Author
photographed and interviewed, giving readings, appearing on TV talk
shows and commenting on current events.
(Jenny, 2006)

Thirdly, Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has become famous for declining
large Hollywood rights offers for her Booker Prize-winning The God of
Small Things (1997), stating uncompromisingly that ‘I don’t think cinema
has to be the last stop for literature’ (Roy, 2001). James F. English uses the
term ‘scandals of refusal’ to describe the inversely proportional relation-
ship of actions whereby refusal of economic capital results in enhancement
of an agent’s symbolic capital within the cultural field (2005: 218). Each
of these cases gives heart to a numerically small but vocal subset of the
literary community which perceives the relationship of books to film as
essentially binary and oppositional – that cinema’s gain would signal
literature’s loss. According to the logic of ‘literary puritanism’, to be anti
adaptation is ipso facto to be more ‘truly’ literary (Langer, 2005).
Of course, after holding out for some decade and a half against screen
producers’ escalating offers, both Márquez and Süskind have in recent
years sold the film rights to their novels: Süskind in 2000 for a rumoured
€10 million and Márquez in 2004 for an estimated US$1–3 million
(Jenny, 2006; Tuckman, 2004). Tellingly retaining the full titles of their
source novels, Love in the Time of Cholera (2007) was shot pre-
dominantly in English and released to mediocre-to-poor reviews,47 while
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006), marketed as an erotically
charged period epic, premiered in Germany to reasonable success, and
was cross-promoted with a range of tie-in merchandising including
Thierry Mugler fragrances (Jenny, 2006).48 This would appear to leave
Roy as the sole high-profile representative of the anti-adaptation position.
Yet, much in the same way the adaptation industry reconfigures deter-
minedly private author–recluses as public personae through the freakish
novelty (pun intended) of their aversion to publicity, here Márquez and
Süskind’s long refusal to sell the film rights became itself a signature
theme of the film adaptations’ marketing and publicity pitches. Thus,
whether or not an adapted novelist chooses to engage directly in pro-
motional activities for a screen adaptation, their authorial persona – so
much more pleasantly tractable and malleable to the publicity machine’s
will – can be readily pressed into service. These novelists’ former gestures
of refusal are not presented by the industry as vitiated by their subsequent
changes of mind. Rather, the initial gestures of economic disinterest are
themselves turned into fodder for the adapted film’s box-office-maxi-
mising publicity campaign.
 The Expanding Role of the Author 49
Conclusion
Where do such head-spinningly paradoxical phenomena leave the author’s
role in the twenty-first-century adaptation economy? The conflation of
authors and their works has a long history, in which the rise of print cul-
ture, the formulation of copyright, and the professionalisation of author-
ship are deeply implicated. While post-structuralist literary theory, book
history and more recent cultural studies analyses of media celebrity have
illuminated much about the construction of literary authorship, none of
these fields has addressed directly the extrapolation of print-based celebrity
across to other media. Foucault’s insight that the author function serves to
classify, valorise and hierarchise texts in academic contexts has been much
repeated, but rarely recalibrated to take account of the twenty-first cen-
tury’s greatly converged media context. Every aspect of the contemporary
adaptation economy functions to expand and replicate the authorial cele-
brity’s role in other media platforms: legally, the creative work is conceived
of as a bundle of separable and individually alienable IP rights; institu-
tionally, multinational media conglomerates span the gamut of analogue,
digital and hybrid media formats; and commercially, the push to achieve
synergy invites cross-promotion and adaptation of content into myriad
simultaneously circulating forms. In such an environment, the contem-
porary author function has itself adapted to become a cultural mechanism
for the classifying, valorising and hierarchising of adapted content: greater
or lesser degrees of authorial involvement in an adapted project – ranging
from rights seller at a minimum to executive producer, screenwriter, actor,
or avid promoter at the other extreme – send potent signals to specific
audience demographics, flagging varying degrees of authorial approval
and validation.
In this way, the author figure takes her place alongside the other
individuals via which the industrial nature of screen production can be
marketed to a society predisposed towards individualist explanations of
cultural phenomena: the film star, the auteur director, the studio mogul.
Yet each of these familiar cultural roles has always, at some fundamental
level, been publicly recognised as working cooperatively and collab-
oratively within an industrial and overwhelmingly commercial context. It
is the writer of books – presumed solitary, high-minded and aesthetically
driven – who represents a far more thoroughly Romanticisable figure via
which to promote adaptations arising from this same industrial and
commercial environment. It is little surprise then that the figure of the
author is ever more tightly imbricated in the contemporary adaptation
industry. The wonder is that adaptation studies has for so long studiously
averted its critical gaze from the fact.
2 World Rights
Literary Agents as Brokers
in the Contemporary
Mediasphere

[I]t seems probable that the service which A.P. Watt began to render
authors a hundred years ago will be increasingly in demand in the years
ahead.
(Rubinstein, 1975: 2358)

[W]hether we like them or not, agents are here, they are flourishing, and
their role is going to grow more, rather than less, important.
(Flanagan, 2003: 12)

One of the most frequently encountered observations about changes in

the Anglophone book world over the last 40 years is the rise to promi-
nence of the literary agent (Baker, 1999: vii; Taylor, D., 1999: 1; Epstein,
2001: 6; Finkelstein and McCleery, 2005: 98; Thompson, 2005: 22).
Whether the forum is a newspaper cultural supplement, a specialist pub-
lishing and bookselling trade journal, or a university creative writing
workshop, a common theme of such discourse is the emergence of a
seemingly intractable Catch 22-style double bind ensnaring aspirant
writers: it is increasingly impossible to get published without an agent;
while, conversely, it is not possible to get an agent without having already
been published. The literary agent, commentators from each sector
dolefully confirm, has become the most powerful of the book industries’
multiple gatekeepers.
Yet such commentators may, counterintuitively, ascribe too great a
degree of agency to the literary agent. Certainly literary agents have, since
the 1970s, aggressively consolidated their position as essential inter-
mediaries in the author–publisher relationship, and have capitalised on
their resultant influence over broader book industry dynamics. But agents
have, over the same period, equally been beneficiaries of tectonic shifts in
the book industries which they did not themselves initiate. Agents have
been able to exploit opportunities created by macro-level industry
developments such as the growing conglomeration and concentration of
book publishing, publisher job insecurity, the casualisation of editing, and
the increased importance of digital rights. Rather than necessarily being
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 51
the prime mover in the book world over the last four decades, the agent
has been as much a serendipitous beneficiary of structural industry re-
alignments, as well as a convenient lightning rod for other stakeholders’
grievances with their own waning influence. What is indisputable,
however, is that agents matter in the contemporary literary scene. The
following discussion seeks to chart the influence of literary agents in three
concentric, and interrelated, spheres of influence: contemporary national
Anglophone book markets; the international book rights economy; and –
at the broadest level – the media landscape through adaptation of book
properties for other mediums.1
Considering how central literary agents have become to the functioning
of the contemporary book world, it is striking how scant, and how
partial, has been the material written about them to date. As with the
research on authorship surveyed in Chapter 1, academic studies of agents
derive loosely from the disciplines of book history, literary studies and
cultural history. These chart the rise of the first literary agents in the
Anglophone world from their emergence in the later decades of the
nineteenth century. Studies of pioneering British and American agents
such as A.P. Watt, J.B. Pinker and Curtis Brown develop detailed histori-
cal accounts of the growing professionalisation of authorship during this
period, and are characterised by close attention to archival resources and
the tracing of longitudinal trends (Hepburn, 1968; Bonham-Carter, 1978;
West, 1988a; 1988b; Gillies, 1993; 1998; 2007; Bonn, 1994; McDonald,
1997; Delany, 2002; Barnes, 2007). However, the chronological frame of
such studies is generally bounded, to use the specific example of one such
scholar – Mary Ann Gillies – by the active careers of the agents them-
selves: from c.1880 when Watt established the first self-described literary
agency, to Pinker’s death in the early 1920s (2007: 7). These studies of
literary agents’ role in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century professional-
isation of authorship seem, oddly, to disavow interest in the accelerating
professionalisation of authorship in the latter half of the twentieth century
and since (cf. Bonn, 1994; Delany 2002).
A second rich body of resources about literary agents is derived from
broadsheet newspapers, trade journals and generalist cultural periodicals.
Such articles document how the literary agent has come increasingly to
register on the consciousness of authors, publishers, book retailers and
readers. Topicality and contemporariness are both the hallmarks and the
drawbacks to this body of research materials: while they provide vital
information charting periodic scandals and crises in the agenting business,
by their very episodic nature they are incapable of contextualising these
developments within long-term timescales or academically derived theo-
retical models offered by the history of the book, political economy of
media, or cultural theory.
A third and final body of research resources about literary agenting is
found in the proliferating ‘how to’ books advising would-be writers, and
52 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
in the sub-genre of agents’ memoirs-cum-business-primers (Curtis, 1983;
1989; Baker, 1999; Australian Society of Authors, 2001; Klebanoff,
2002; Spender, 2004; Phelan, 2005; Earnshaw, 2007). These books are
richly anecdotal, and benefit from often otherwise undocumented first-
hand experiences of the book trade. Their relentlessly individualistic focus
is, moreover, fairly representative of a profession populated in the main
by rugged individualists and entrepreneurial non-conformists. But the
research potential of the genre – penned by New York City-based agents,
in the main – is too often marred by retrospective points scoring and ego-
riddled grandstanding. Suffice it to say that none of these self-memorial-
ising agents are at risk of underestimating their personal influence on the
course of the international book industries.
What is noticeably absent from the extant literature about literary
agents is an effective synthesis of these various scholarly, journalistic and
autobiographical streams to create a coherent overview explaining the rise
to prominence, and now pivotal position, of the agent. The contemporary
book world and encompassing mediasphere have much to gain from
viewing literary culture not through the inevitably atomising lenses of
specific book titles, authorial careers, or publishing houses, but instead
understanding each of these specific interests as emanations of a complex
overarching commercial, industrial and legal machinery. Such a systemic
approach does not go so far as to deny the agency of individuals – on the
contrary, the business of author representation is one of the most
individual-driven, small enterprise-dominated spheres left in the book
industry, and is sought out by many publishing veterans for precisely this
reason. But such catalysing figures nevertheless work within larger frame-
works over which they have only limited – if any – control. To paraphrase
Marx, literary agents may make book history, but they do so in print
culture circumstances not always of their choosing. To capture the
complexities of the contemporary book world in which today’s agents
operate, both this determining big-picture macro-environment and the
accumulation of micro-scale individual choices need to be borne in mind,
and creatively interrelated.
In the discussion that follows I attempt to forge such a synthesis first
by outlining the role of literary agents, and by charting their increasing
industry sway over authors, editors and publishers during the last 40
years. The analysis then turns to consider in sequence three pivotal
moments which crystallised significant trends in agenting’s cultural
profile: the infamous 1994–95 Martin Amis/Andrew Wylie saga sur-
rounding The Information (1995); the 2001–02 controversy surrounding
the same agent’s securing of remarkably lucrative international deals for
first-time Australian novelist Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True
Crime (2002); and the well-publicised 2007–08 stoush between esteemed
UK literary agency Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) and the former agents
who decamped to establish the rival firm United Agents, taking the
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 53
majority of their clients with them. Each of these scandals acts almost as
a strobe-light flash, freezing and framing in a striking way industry
changes which usually pass too incrementally to be remarked upon. In
relation to the most recent of these disputes, the crisis at PFD, UK
publishing industry commentator Joel Rickett has lamented journalists’
reductionist treatment of the literary representation business as a series of
‘spat[s] between personalities’ (Addley and Fitzsimmons, 2008: 31).
Granted, his criticism has merit, especially in relation to the relentlessly
personalising drift of UK media coverage, whether broadsheet, tabloid or
– increasingly – online. But my aim here is not to reinforce journalism’s
standard tactic of presenting book industry upheavals as stand-offs
between various warring Type-A personalities (Murray, 2004a). Instead,
I aim to use these well-documented ‘spats’ only as jumping-off points for
a more nuanced and contextualised analysis of how agents as a group
became powerful brokers in the contemporary book world and – via the
currency of book rights – in the broader mediasphere.

‘One Fixed Point in the Compass’:2 The Rise and Rise of

the Literary Agent
The literary agent’s job description comprises three main tasks: to select
manuscripts for placement with targeted publishers; to provide sugges-
tions for and editorial feedback on manuscripts; and to negotiate optimal
contractual terms and exploitation of book-related rights on behalf of
their author–clients (Coser, Kadushin and Powell, 1982: 287; Lurie,
1988: 24; Bonn, 1992: 65; Franklin, 2002: 275–76). Given that all of
these tasks were, prior to the literary agent’s emergence in the late nine-
teenth century, handled by either authors themselves or their publishers,
it is fair to speculate as to why the agent emerged at all. In particular, it
seems apposite to investigate what broader industrial shifts allowed the
dramatic expansion of the agent’s role in the post-1960s book world.
Authors have come to rely upon literary agents in direct proportion to
the growing complexity of the creative industries and the increasingly
arcane terminology employed in publishing contracts (Tranter, 2008).
Few authors possess the legal qualifications, extensive commercial know-
ledge or – it has to be said – sufficient interest to be able to comprehend
fully the standard terms of book contracts in the contemporary world.
(There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule: British novelist
Jeanette Winterson is well known in publishing circles to scrutinise her
book and film rights contracts avidly and to pursue legal action to protect
rights to her name; and bestselling Australian popular fiction writer Bryce
Courtenay has dispensed with an agent and now handles all local rights
issues himself (Lambert, 1998; Lurie, 2001).)3 Nevertheless, the majority
of authors lack the expertise, time or inclination to consider their writing
first and foremost as a tradable commodity. In this can be discerned
54 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
another of Romanticism’s lingering legacies, whereby too great an atten-
tion to the commercial aspects of writing threatens to undermine the
author’s artistic self-conception. Even in circumstances where this Mount
Parnassus vs. Grub Street tension does not trouble an author’s self-image,
it at the very least takes valuable time and energy from the author’s
principal task – writing.
Publishers have long enjoyed the upper hand in exploiting authors’
demotion of commercial self-interest in favour of aesthetic high-
mindedness. As novelist Anita Desai expresses it with wryly circular logic,
‘I finally acquired an agent, rather guiltily, because it was so against my
publisher’s wishes, which alerted me to the need for one’ (1995: 98). It
may come as some surprise, given publishers’ demonising of agents as
parasitic interlopers almost since the agent’s emergence, to realise that
publishers may in fact prefer an author to be professionally represented
(West, 1988a; 1988b; Bonn, 1994; Dowling, 2004; Tranter, 2008). The
agent can act as a mutually convenient buffer in tense author–publisher
negotiations, undertaking the tough-minded commercial haggling and
thus leaving author and publisher free to revel in their shared aesthetic
ambitions for a book. Acclaimed Australian children’s author Mem Fox
describes how, once she was already in print, her publisher urged her to
hire an agent: ‘“Talking to you directly is spoiling our relationship. We
like you. You like us. We’d like it to stay that way, but trouble is looming.
Get an agent for God’s sake. And ours”’ (Lurie, 1988: 26). The agent’s
circuit-breaker role has also been endorsed by the Australian Society of
Authors with a more robustly ballistic metaphor: ‘If your bullets are
reasonably shaped, a good agent will fire them for you and allow you to
keep your relationship with your publisher amiable’ (2001: 105).4
That agents are now able to present themselves as indispensable go-
betweens in the author–publisher relationship depends crucially upon
major structural shifts which the publishing business has been undergoing
since roughly the 1960s. Many commentators have noted the effects of
widespread subsumption of book publishers into multinational conglom-
erates under the impact of economic rationalist, deregulatory media
policies, reaching a crescendo in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but never
since abating (Whiteside, 1981; Long, 1985–86; Miller, 1997; Schiffrin,
1998; 2001; Epstein, 2001; Todd, 2006; Murray, 2007b). Because
rampant title acquisition and short-term profits drive the business model
of such publishers, many editors felt their professional role as author–
mentors diminished and chose – or were forced – to move rapidly between
publishing houses, leaving their former authors effectively ‘orphaned’
(Hart, 1984: 170; Look, 1999: 15–16; Franklin, 2002: 278; Rolley, 2005;
Harwood, 2008). Agents were able to step adroitly into the gap so created
and to cultivate ongoing, creatively nurturing relationships with authors,
becoming ‘the one constant in the author’s life’ (Holt, 1979: 137). The
agent thus usurped the Maxwell Perkins archetype of the editor as
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 55
creative mentor, a changing of the publishing industry guard nicely
encapsulated in the title of a reflective essay by editor Gerald Howard:
‘Mistah Perkins – He Dead’ (Howard, 1993; Kleinfield, 1980: 9; Berg,
1997; Gardiner, 2000b: 67).
Publishers also stood to benefit from the agent’s new profile and
capabilities. The boom in university creative writing courses throughout
the developed world during the same period created a glut of unsolicited
manuscript submissions to publishers, which they – with their newly
streamlined staff – were only too happy to outsource to agents as
essentially free publishers’ readers. The agent, rather than the publisher,
now took on the dubious mantle of ‘first filter of the slush pile’, to such
an extent that many agents have now followed publishers’ lead in refusing
to accept unsolicited submissions (Franklin, 2002; Waldren, 2002;
Dowling, 2004; Rolley, 2005; Tranter, 2008, Inglis, 2008).5 For already-
published authors, the agent was able to perform much of the editorial
labour on manuscripts that had formerly been undertaken by editorial
staff in-house. That agents were prepared to finesse clients’ work pre-
publication on a commission basis concomitantly freed publishers to
outsource to freelancers ever more of their copy-editing, or to abandon
structural editing almost entirely in the rush to cut costs (Weisberg, 1991;
Franklin, 2002).
These macro-level industry upheavals have been extensively dwelt upon
by commentators on the contemporary publishing industry, frequently in
a tone of bittersweet lament for a putative golden age of high publishing
standards since too-hastily abandoned. But such analyses tend to over-
look a marked benefit of book imprints’ acquisition by multinational con-
glomerates: the increased profile and afterlife enjoyed by books adapted
for other media formats. The bibliocentric snobbery and comparative
ignorance of other media industries’ working practices characterising the
former ‘gentlemen’s publishing’ era do not cloud the perspicacity of the
literary agent, now charged with managing the proliferating subsidiary
and non-book rights in clients’ contracts. Especially as agents’ income
derives from a 10–20 per cent commission rate, literary agents have every
incentive to pursue multiformatting opportunities for book content, and
to familiarise themselves with the business practices of conglomerate
publishers’ affiliate film, television and periodical divisions.6 To posit one-
off publication as the natural lifecycle of a book is, for an agent, tanta-
mount to business suicide; in Sarah Brouillette’s phrase, agents are ‘in
effect auctioning each iteration of a given title off to the highest bidder’
(2007: 65). The relative roles of author, agent and publisher have so
shifted over the preceding four decades that industry veterans such as
Jason Epstein even forecast a not-too-distant era in which ‘name-brand’
authors and their agents will subcontract out traditional publisher func-
tions of production, marketing, publicity and distribution, and thus dis-
pense with publishers entirely (2001: 19). While this is not yet in evidence
56 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
in any significant way, it is nevertheless notable that US literary agents are
increasingly expanding their suite of services to incorporate book market-
ing and publicity, tasks previously the exclusive domain of publishers
(Mayer, 1989; Kirkpatrick, 2002). The recently established New York
City-based Folio Literary Management for example has announced
creation of ‘an internal public relations department that would coordinate
with a publisher’s marketing and publicity staff to push an author’s book’
(Larimer, 2006: 21). Despite some ongoing demarcation disputes, the
general trend of increasingly porous agent and publisher roles is unmis-
takable.
Considering the rise of the agent against such a backdrop of broad-scale
industry realignment and restructuring disproves journalists’ too often
glib assumption that the rise of the agent is attributable principally to the
abrasive personalities and sharp elbows of the business’s most prominent
practitioners. The agent’s rise in the literary firmament is due in part to
serendipitous dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time, as
well as partly to agents’ strategic savvy in exploiting the new oppor-
tunities presented by shifts in the book industries landscape. Hence
literary agents have promoted the consistency of the relationship they can
offer writer–clients, their commitment to building long-term authorial
careers, and their ability to nurture and mentor creativity – the psycho-
logical hand-holding undertones of which claim go some way to explain-
ing why author representation – in the UK and Australia especially –
is overwhelmingly female-dominated (Lurie, 1983; Waldren, 2002;
Michael, 2005, Inglis, 2008).7 Similarly, the fact that many agents were
themselves former editors, abandoning the newly inhospitable marketing-
led environment of corporate publishing, validated agents’ claim to
provide detailed manuscript assessment and structural editing advice as
an author’s trusted first reader. Leading New York literary agent, Lynn
Nesbit, stated in 2000 that ‘younger agents are doing more editing and
giving more editorial advice than at any time in the last 25 years’ (Arnold,
2000: 3). It is a verdict with which Melbourne-based literary agent Jacinta
di Mase broadly concurs, asserting that ‘the enhanced editorial role is one
that agents have been forced into’ (Michael, 2005: 12).8 Unlike the in-
house editor, sandwiched between the frequently competing interests of
creative author and bottom-line-oriented publisher, agents are unprob-
lematically clear-eyed about where their chief loyalty lies. Securing
authors the best possible advance, contractual conditions, and ongoing
rights-derived income provides agencies’ bread and butter. This serves to
concentrate agents’ minds wonderfully.
The most tangible manifestation of literary agents’ now-established
centrality to book-world operations is found in the hangar-sized, multi-
level halls of the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The late UK agent Giles
Gordon stated that it was once unknown for agents to do business at the
world’s largest and most important literary trade fair but that, by the
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 57
early 1990s, agents were attending in their hundreds annually to scout,
promote and sell rights on clients’ behalf (1993: 172). Literary agencies
of any scale from around the world now routinely reserve tables in
Frankfurt’s dedicated Literary Agents’ and Scouts Centre, while larger
transnational agencies such as The Wylie Agency rent whole stands in the
general halls, with agency directors commonly attending the first day of
the Fair in person (‘Andrew’, 2006). Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary
of Frankfurt’s Agents’ Centre in 2008, the organisers of the world’s
largest book event went so far as to proudly dub the agents’ section ‘the
most important working centre at the Frankfurt Book Fair’ – making it
the book world’s veritable holy of holies.9 In recent years, Frankfurt
convenors have additionally established a separate Agents’ Centre within
the Book Fair’s dedicated Film and Media Forum (formerly named the
International Agents Centre for Adaptations & Screenplay). This inno-
vation is designed specifically for publishers, agents and producers to
trade screen and other non-book rights to properties, and has been repli-
cated at other major international book fairs – an important cross-
industry trend explored in detail in the following chapter.10 It is difficult
to imagine more concrete manifestations of agents’ now pivotal role in
the contemporary global mediasphere.

‘I Don’t See Why Good Writers Shouldn’t be Paid as Well

as Bad Ones’:11 Amis, Wylie and The Information
Any discussion of literary agents must, perforce, make some mention of
the 1994–95 scandal surrounding the publication of literary novelist
Martin Amis’s The Information (1995), as the incident constitutes a high-
water mark in public awareness of literary agents’ contemporary book-
world power. The Information saga, involving as it did leading New
York-based agent Andrew Wylie, also foregrounded crucial differences in
transatlantic attitudes to agents’ role and function within the Anglophone
sphere. For the UK book world, within which the unfolding scandal of
The Information chiefly took place, the incident represents the most high-
profile importation of the US ‘superagent’ figure into the more ‘genteel’
structures of the British book community – a community whose self-
perception was permanently altered as a result of the fracas.
An avalanche of journalistic commentary about the circumstances of
The Information’s publication already exists, so I intend here only to
outline the bare-bones facts of the case as background to the contextual
analysis that follows. In November 1994 Martin Amis, one of the UK’s
most prominent and controversial literary authors, instructed his agent,
the late Pat Kavanagh of the firm Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, to seek a
£500,000 publishing advance for his new manuscript, The Information
(Hillmore, 1994).12 Amis’s previous hardback publisher, the prestigious
Random House literary imprint Jonathan Cape, declined Kavanagh’s
58 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
offer, details of the unmet asking price were leaked to the press, and a
storm of controversy erupted, fuelled by allegations from fellow literary
heavyweight A.S. Byatt that Amis’s demands were motivated by excessive
greed and effectively diminished the pool of advance money available for
first-time and mid-list authors (Weale, 1994; Alberge, 1995; Ellison,
1995; Amis, 2000: 247). By early January 1995, Amis had fired Kavanagh
(thus also putting into hiatus his long friendship with Kavanagh’s hus-
band, fellow literary author Julian Barnes) and had hired New York
literary agent Andrew Wylie, earning Wylie his now ubiquitous predatory
epithet – ‘the Jackal’ – from the UK media (Amis, 2000: 234, 247–48).13
Wylie secured a rumoured £480,000 advance from HarperCollins for the
UK and Commonwealth rights to The Information as well as to a volume
of short stories (Macdonald, 1995). The purchase price was, ironically,
close to the earlier rejected offer Kavanagh had secured from Cape, and
widely interpreted as a risky gamble by HarperCollins to bolster a mass-
market-dominated list with some heavy-weight literary credentials
(Hillmore, 1994; Delany, 2002). The deal sparked another round of nega-
tive publicity for Amis, focussing chiefly on his recent divorce, his choice
of expensive US dental reconstruction, and endless riffs on how for Amis
– chronicler of 1980s-style City-boy greed in his novels Money (1984) and
London Fields (1989) – life appeared to be imitating art.14 The UK release
of The Information was brought forward to capitalise on the spate of
publicity; it appeared to mixed reviews in March 1995, and failed to earn
out its advance (Cowley, 1997: 15; Amis, 2000: 253). In a further ironic
coda, in December 1996 Wylie arranged for Amis to return to Cape in a
four-book deal which also included return of Amis’s paperback rights
from Penguin, where Cape had licensed them (Rawsthorn, 1996b;
Cowley, 1999; Gardiner, 2000b). The Information thus remains the only
Martin Amis title published by HarperCollins, now referred to by Wylie
as ‘a temporary minder of Martin’ (Barber, 1999: 12). None of Amis’s
subsequent publications at Cape has matched the impact of his pre-
Information 1980s critical and commercial successes.15
The lead-up to the US publication of The Information in May 1995 by
Random House US imprint Harmony Books saw the details of the UK
scandal once more rehashed but, interestingly, the US media’s take on the
saga was as a quaintly puzzling, quintessentially British storm in a teacup
(Yardley, 1995; Wilson, 1995; Sheppard, 1995; Gilbert, 1995). In part this
difference in reaction can be attributed to the figure of the ‘superagent’
having become an established figure in the US book world since the rise of
New York City-based agents such as Scott Meredith, Morton L. Janklow
and Arthur M. Klebanoff in the 1970s.16 These agents specialised in the
packaging of mass-market books as ‘properties’, pioneering now-standard
practices of multiple submission of manuscripts to publishers, silent auc-
tions, aggressive exploitation of subsidiary and foreign territory rights, and
arranging ghostwriting of manuscripts under authorial brand names
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 59

Figure 2.1 Martin Amis caricature by Gerald Scarfe (1995), playing on A.S.
Byatt’s remark that Amis was ‘turkey-cocking’ other writers through
seeking an excessive advance
© Gerald Scarfe
60 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
(Kleinfield, 1980: 9; Coser,, Kadushin and Powell, 1982: 300; Janklow,
1985; Lurie, 2001; Franklin, 2002; Klebanoff, 2002). The US literary scene,
unperturbed by agents’ self-appointed role as maximisers of authors’
income, appeared baffled by their UK counterparts’ response to Wylie and
Amis’ robustly commercial approach to publishing literary fiction.
Perhaps perversely for a novel that depicts the baser machinations of the
contemporary publishing world, The Information has also spawned a
number of academic studies. These range from, at one end, literary critical-
style reflections on the postmodern hall-of-mirrors effect of the book’s
publication seeming to counterpoint the novel’s narrative: two writers –
one a shambolic failure, the other rich and feted – locked in bitter rivalry
(Howard, 1996).17 At the less textual and more contextual end of literary
studies stand explorations by Joe Moran (2000), Hugh Look (1999), Juliet
Gardiner (2000a; 2000b), Paul Delany (2002), Richard Todd (2006) and
James F. English and John Frow (2006) of the Information saga as a prime
example of authorial branding, thus radically complicating post-struc-
turalist predictions of ‘the death of the author’ (see also Chapter 1). For
Claire Squires (2007), The Information’s pre-publicity hype serves as an
illustrative example of how marketing buzz, rather than editorial decision
making, has come to dominate UK publishing.
These works are commendable for being among the mere handful of
academic studies critically analysing the role of literary agents in the
contemporary book world, and I do not propose to reiterate their findings
here. I prefer to analyse the Information saga as significant more for what
contemporary journalistic commentators did not say about the events,
rather than for what they incessantly did say. The incidents surrounding
The Information in the mid 1990s captured in starkest form a phenom-
enon which had been growing incrementally throughout the 1980s, but
which had not, to that point, fully registered upon (UK) public conscious-
ness: that literary agents had become celebrities in their own right, their
fame deriving from the accumulated lustre of their client list, and at points
eclipsing that of any single client. As US writer Edwin McDowell observed
of the literary world in a prescient 1989 survey, ‘the top agents are no
longer just powers behind the scenes, but celebrities as famous as many
of their clients’ (C26). But it was not until six years later that the
celebrity–agent phenomenon could no longer be face-savingly dismissed
by UK book publishers as a crassly American phenomenon. Moreover,
The Wylie Agency, already by 1995 boasting offices in New York and
London, struck a final blow against the nostalgic and even by then
tottering notion that the contemporary book world could be divided into
discrete national markets, each with distinctive business practices and
specific agenting mores.
Secondly, the journalistic feeding-frenzy set off by Wylie’s aggressive
representation of The Information did not at any point allege impropriety
on Amis’s part in hiring an agent, but solely that the business practices of
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 61
Wylie breached UK author representatives’ self-enforced Code of Practice
forbidding poaching of another agent’s clients.18 This important distinc-
tion passed almost entirely unremarked in UK coverage at the time, and in
academic commentaries since. Yet it is immensely significant, as it marks
the final nail in the coffin of the debate (which had by that point been
running for over a century) as to whether literary agents should exist at all,
or whether (as was alleged by certain turn-of-the-century publishers) they
represented an improper encroachment upon the ‘sanctity’ of the author–
publisher dyad.19 By failing to posit the literary agent’s existence as the
crux of the Information controversy, UK journalists and other commen-
tators tacitly conceded that the agent had become an indispensable, even
legitimate player in the late-twentieth-century book world.
The third telling, and also less commented upon, aspect of the
Information affair was the way it highlighted the introduction to the
realms of literary fiction of agenting techniques previously honed in mass-
market publishing. In packaging and hawking Amis’s literary wares with
such commercial gusto, Wylie was adopting tactics previously identified
with the likes of Meredith, Janklow and Klebanoff, so-called ‘superagents’
whose combined lists include(d) bestselling commercial fiction authors
such as Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steele, Barbara Taylor
Bradford, Sidney Sheldon and popular astrologist Linda Goodman. Wylie
has taken every opportunity to display his high-literary contempt for these
earlier agents – dubbing them the literary equivalent of heroin dealers –
and thus to distinguish himself from the ranks of mass-market agents
(Mayer, 1989; Painton, 1989). Nevertheless, his unabashedly commercial
tactics clearly derive from such agents’ earlier strategies, albeit Wylie
justifies his high asking prices for clients’ work on the premise that a classic
book, over the course of its publishing history, will out-earn an over-hyped
front-list seasonal bestseller (Barber, 1999). As Wylie later summed up his
take on the Information furore, ‘what we were trying to do was to
represent quality with the same kind of discipline that had been brought
to the representation of bestsellers’ (Grove, 2007).20
Wylie’s espoused position may be in part a rational response to the
contemporary hyper-commercial, conglomerate-dominated book world
in which an esteemed literary fiction imprint such as Cape sits along-
side mass-market imprints such as Century and Arrow in the corporate
holdings of Random House, itself a component of German multimedia
giant Bertelsmann. But Wylie’s oft-stated, implicitly Leavisite/New Critical
position that there is manifestly ‘great’ writing and then there is self-
evident ‘trash’ sits at odds with his business tactics: if the two classes of
books can be handled in a similar manner (at least in theory) by the same
agents, published by the same conglomerates, and distributed, sold and
accounted for by the same industry retail networks, it suggests that the
category of ‘literature’ may be as much a function of circuits of book
industry circulation, valorisation and consumption as is mass-market
62 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
bestsellerdom.21 This interpretation goes to the heart of why the
Information scandal touched a raw nerve in the UK book world, still in
1995 reeling from the seemingly endless cycle of mergers and takeovers
characterising the 1980s, and punch-drunk from the deep recession of the
early 1990s. The event proved not only that the UK book world could not
be quarantined from transatlantic developments;22 it moreover demon-
strated with uncomfortable directness that the semi-sacred category of
‘literature’ could no longer be insulated (if it ever actually had been) from
the machinations of market machinery by the convenient fig-leaf that
different agents and different houses handled different books differently.
In the words of one astute UK commentator, such a taste-stratified view
of the contemporary book world was, by the mid 1990s, wilfully
anachronistic: ‘it is all about money, nowadays, the publishing business;
our image of tweedy, decent publishers is about as usefully relevant, as
contemporary or as accurate as an image of, say, a Britain still in charge
of an empire’ (Lezard, 1995: 24).

‘Representing Writers Seamlessly around the World’:23

Hooper, Wylie and A Child’s Book of True Crime
In a manner that must have proven immensely gratifying to the invet-
erately self-promoting Andrew Wylie, the agent was in 2001 once again
playing a pivotal role in the unfolding narrative of literary representation.
In a second agenting strobe-flash incident chosen here for case study,
Wylie this time provoked not controversy over transatlantic publishing
differences, but a different variety of tension around cultural globalisa-
tion: the conflict between established cultural nationalist paradigms in
post-colonial countries such as Australia, and the internationalising,
cosmopolitanising trends of the twenty-first-century literary marketplace.
The long-roiling tension between Australia’s national cultural sphere, still
feeling itself vulnerable in the face of British assumptions of superiority,
and an aspirant class of local writers seeking global audiences came to a
head over young Australian novelist Chloe Hooper’s debut A Child’s
Book of True Crime (2002). The incident demonstrates the inadequacy
of conceptualising the Anglophone adaptation industry solely in terms of
a bilateral US–UK relationship, when inflows of creative content from
countries of the Anglophone ‘periphery’ present important and revivifying
challenges to adaptations studies’ usual (though always tacic) geographi-
cal parameters. Once again, my aim here is to outline briefly the facts of
the case as necessary background for exploring more enticing questions
of why the circumstances of the book’s publication ignited such latent
tensions.
Hooper was in the late 1990s a Fulbright postgraduate student enrolled
in Columbia University’s prestigious Creative Writing Program. Upon the
recommendation of visiting lecturer Philip Roth, already a star Wylie
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 63
client, Hooper in late 2000 approached The Wylie Agency’s New York
office with the first half of a manuscript for her novel, A Child’s Book of
True Crime. In a narrative twist straight out of would-be authorial fan-
tasies, Wylie read the writing sample, accepted Hooper as a client the
same day, and proceeded to arrange single-book publishing deals in 15
countries (Tabakoff, 2002; Steger, 2002; Wyndham, 2002a; Dapin,
2008). The silent auction process Wylie engineered in early 2001 for sale
of the book’s Australian and New Zealand rights is indicative of the kind
of short-timeframe, hyper-competitive, hype-inducing climate that Wylie
strives to cultivate for clients’ work. The manuscript was emailed to major
publishers, and Wylie and Hooper flew to Sydney, stating that they would
receive best bids and detailed marketing plans for the title a few days
hence (Lurie, 2001: 9; Davis, 2007: 129). This pressure-cooker process
was designed, as a characteristically seigniorial Wylie puts it, ‘so everyone
had to scramble like mad. I thought, “Anyone who scrambles hard
enough will be worthy of talking to”’ (Dapin, 2008: 34).24 After signifi-
cant controversy in the Australian book community over Wylie’s allegedly
high-handed, manipulative and imperialising tactics, Random House
Australia bought the title for an estimated A$75,000–100,000 and pub-
lished True Crime under their literary fiction imprint Knopf in February
2002 (Lurie, 2001; Steger, 2002). Cape/Vintage in the UK and Knopf/
Scribner in the US successfully bid for the combined hardback and paper-
back rights and published almost simultaneously with the Australian
publication date (Steger, 2002). True Crime was soon afterwards short-
listed for the UK’s Orange Prize, was named a New York Times Notable
Book for the same year, and won the UK’s Betty Trask Prize for 2002
(Wyndham, 2002a: 15; 2002c: 17; Dapin, 2008: 31).
Within weeks of the book’s publication, Wylie also negotiated sale of
the film rights to production company Good Machine, responsible for
previous hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2003) and Ang Lee’s
Sense and Sensibility (1995). Random House Australia’s then Executive
Publisher, Jane Palfreyman, was quoted as confidently predicting that
‘this [film] will definitely get made’, although, as of the time of writing,
industry resource the Internet Movie Database shows no signs of the
project being in active development (Wyndham, 2002b: 3). In a further
coda, Hooper in 2006 won one of Australia’s top journalism prizes, the
Walkley Awards, for her Monthly magazine feature about Aboriginal–
white race relations in Queensland, and has since expanded this material
into her second book, The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
(2008), which itself won Premier’s Awards for non-fiction in three
Australian states.25 This second book publication is part of a further
Wylie-negotiated two-book deal with Penguin Australia estimated to have
secured Hooper an advance of over $300,000 (Dapin, 2008: 31).
The circumstances of True Crime’s publication foreground in par-
ticularly stark fashion that the national cultural sphere is no longer a
64 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
self-evident first step in emerging Australian writers’ careers. The idea that
Australian literature should be consecrated first and foremost by
Australia’s own cultural institutions is a politically and emotionally
resonant concept in contemporary Australia, dating most recognisably
from the cultural nationalism championed under the Labor Prime
Ministership of Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s (McPhee, 2001; Nile,
2002). This cultural nationalist model, tantamount to an article of faith
for the Left-leaning Baby Boomers who dominate Australia’s cultural
institutions, would endorse, say, Peter Carey’s career trajectory as opti-
mal for an aspiring Australian author: Carey started out publishing short
stories in Australian literary magazines, was first published in book
form by independent publisher University of Queensland Press, won
Australia’s major literary fiction prize – the Miles Franklin Award – twice,
before proceeding to international critical acclaim and commercial
success via a Booker Prize win (later subsequently consolidated and
reaffirmed by a second Booker victory). Such a cursus honorum implicitly
posits Australia’s own cultural apparatus as selector and guarantor of
authentic, quality Australian writing, with subsequent international (and,
specifically, British) acclaim merely serving to validate the perspicacity of
Australia’s cultural arbiters in the first instance. In direct contrast to this
widely – albeit often only implicitly – endorsed career pattern, Tasmanian
novelist Richard Flanagan in a 2003 keynote address to the Australian
Publishers Association observed ‘we have begun to see the phenomenon
of our younger writers taking their first or second book to New York
agents, who then cut them some large deals globally’ (2003: 12).26 This
was patently a reference to the then still-recent memory of Wylie’s True
Crime rights auction, but Flanagan’s remark is equally applicable to other
youngish Australian-born writers. This expanding group might include
Elliot Perlman (also a Wylie client), Nikki Gemmell (represented by David
Godwin in London), or 2008 Booker-shortlisted novelist, Steve Toltz
(whose debut novel A Fraction of the Whole bypassed Australian agents
to be represented directly by Curtis Brown’s London office)27 (2003: 12;
Pfanner, 2004; Inglis, 2008; Hawley, 2009).28 Such writers also strike
deals with multiple publishers in multiple foreign territories – not, as
formerly, necessarily with international subsidiaries of a UK ‘parent’
house – and derive greatest publicity from association with prestigious
international book awards and from reviews in leading international
newspapers’ literary supplements.
Wylie’s Australian auctioning of a still-unknown Hooper’s manuscript
provoked such ire precisely because it imperiously usurped the hard-won
status of Australia’s cultural institutions to bestow imprimatur on local
talent, prompting a defiant HarperCollins Australia Publishing Director
Shona Martyn to declare she would not engage in the auction process
(Lurie, 2001: 9).29 Australian literary agents also keenly resented Wylie’s
incursion on what they regarded as their home turf: Australian agents I
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 65
interviewed deplored Wylie’s behaviour as ‘irresponsible agenting’ – over-
hyping a first-time author, driving up advances, and then tarnishing the
author’s reputation and subsequent publication chances when the
advance fails to earn out (Inglis, 2008).30 A third print culture sector in
Australia, that comprising book reviewers for leading newspapers and
cultural periodicals, also seems to have resented the metropole-comes-to-
the-provinces overtones of Wylie’s gesture, albeit that this time they
emanated from the neo-colonial centre of New York rather than from the
nineteenth-century imperial ‘home’ of London. Australian reviews of
True Crime unfailingly mentioned the book’s pre-publication ‘hyp[ing] to
the max’, leading publisher Jane Palfreyman to note testily, ‘It’s been
much better received overseas than in Australia’ (Goldsworthy, 2002: 8;
Wyndham, 2002a: 15; Steger, 2002). The whole True Crime incident
provides a fascinating insight into the complexly interlinked machinery of
the literary economy: literary agenting and publication details feed into
and crucially influence questions of critical reception and prize cultures;
and the plaudits of critics and (overseas) prize committees are then eagerly
reappropriated by cultural producers in the form of glowing cover copy,
prize-associated publicity, and screen rights sales.
The final intriguing aspect of the True Crime case is how Wylie’s
actions, decried by the Australian book world as imperialising, perhaps
unintentionally worked to reinforce a key tenet of the Australian cultural
nationalist position – the ‘splitting’ of so-called ‘Commonwealth’ book
rights into separate UK and Australia/New Zealand territories. The quasi-
papal division of the world’s English-language book markets into
exclusive ‘British Commonwealth’ and ‘US’ (including Canada) territories
arose from a profit-maximising non-compete agreement hammered out
between the UK and US book industries in the destabilised wake of World
War II. Under the terms of this tellingly named ‘Traditional Market
Agreement’ (1947) the US book trade would concentrate upon its vast
domestic market (which also ‘encompassed’ Canada – an assumption that
in time became highly controversial amongst Canadian cultural national-
ists); Great Britain would maintain exclusive rights to its smaller domestic
market and those of other, non-Canadian dominions that had become
crucial to British publishers’ profitability. Continental Europe’s growing
Anglophone readership was classified as an open market (Owen, 1992:
54; New, 2002: 404; Nile, 2002: 29–30; Munro and Curtain, 2006: 3–4;
Flood, 2007; Gerson and Michon, 2007; Savarese, 2007).
The Australian book industry has long decried the UK publishing
industry’s still-evident preference for bundling together ‘UK and
Commonwealth rights’ (including Australia) in book contracts and their
frequent refusal to consider purchasing a title if Australian/New Zealand
rights have already been sold elsewhere. Antipodean critics claim that the
practice artificially inhibits development of local writing and publishing
cultures, reduces authors’ royalties from full ‘home’ (i.e. Australian) rate
66 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
to the substantially lower ‘export’ (i.e. UK) royalty rates, and – most
galling of all – manifests a patronisingly anachronistic and offensively
colonialist view of Australian culture on the part of the British book
world (Savarese, 2007; Steger, 2008; Rosenbloom, 2008a; Tranter, 2008;
Weir, 2009).31 In stinging words delivered by Henry Rosenbloom,
Publisher at Melbourne-based independent house Scribe, in a speech at
the 2008 Adelaide Writers’ Week, ‘This is a neo-colonial hangover . . .
this is our country, this is our territory, this is our industry. We need these
books more than you do and we’re entitled to them and you’re not’
(Steger, 2008: 5).32 In surprising contrast Wylie, the American accused
over the Information affair of displaying an arrogantly imperialist
attitude towards the British book world, here emerges as Australian
cultural nationalists’ unexpected ally. This is because Wylie’s standard
policy is to separate out his authors’ rights in each book property into
individually contractible territories. Hooper has stated her gratitude to
Wylie for insisting on striking a separate Australian publishing deal for
True Crime on the grounds that ‘you’re an Australian writer and, at the
beginning and end of the day, your home territory is the most important
one’ (Steger, 2002: 7).33

Figure 2.2 UK publishers’ rights policies, according to The Age newspaper

(Melbourne)
© Andrew Dyson/Fairfaxphotos
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 67
Moreover, Wylie’s agenting strategy is distinguished by an attention to
foreign territory and translation rights atypical in the industry, including
particular scrutiny of clients’ work that may have dropped out of print in
specific territories, and is thus not earning income for authors (nor, by
extension, for their agent). Such a policy promotes – in this instance for
Wylie’s Australian authors – optimal international exposure of their work
– again a core principle of the established cultural nationalist position. In
this, Wylie the agent displays commonalities with a publishing stake-
holder who might, in other circumstances, be thought of as an opponent.
Though agents and publishers frequently lock horns over the size of
advances and which specific subsidiary and foreign rights are included in
book contracts, publisher Michael Heyward, head of Melbourne-based
firm Text, in fact displays a similarly internationalist outlook in striking
publishing deals for authors for whom Text controls overseas rights
(Bonn, 1992: 69; Gordon, 1993: 168). Heyward aims to create ‘a patch-
work quilt of rights sales’ that will enable authors to live off their writing
in a way that the small Australian market alone is unlikely to sustain
(Sullivan, 2002: 6). To facilitate such deal making, Text in 2004 signed
a joint venture with Edinburgh-based independent house Canongate
(itself no stranger to the imperialising assumptions of the London book
trade) and now conducts its Frankfurt Book Fair rights business out of
Canongate’s sizable stand (Knox, 2004).34 Motivated by two quite
distinct agendas, nationalist-minded Australian publishers and Wylie, the
self-styled international agent, have thus, curiously, arrived at the same
position on the hotly contested issue of ‘splitting’ territorial book rights.
Once again, the entrenched nineteenth-century hostility between pub-
lishers and literary agents has been strikingly reconfigured by the shifting
tectonic plates of the contemporary mediasphere.
There is however no doubt, in spite of the above, that Wylie has his
own imperialising ambitions. From its original New York City base, The
Wylie Agency has spawned offices in London, Tokyo and Madrid, and is
currently aggressively exploiting non-English-language rights markets
globally, including a recent incursion into that bastion of cultural
protectionism, France. The otherwise starkly minimalist Wylie Agency
homepage boasts a single image of planet Earth viewed from space, a
fitting emblem for Wylie’s ‘world rights’ ambitions and his touchstone
that ‘you have to be international’ (Barber, 1999: 12).35 Wylie has stated
repeatedly in interviews since the late 1990s that he intends to represent
the best writers – whether living or via their estates – across all territories
and in all languages (Barber, 1999: 12; Bockris, 1999; Grove, 2007).
Hence Hooper is patently a mere bit-part player in a much grander agent-
ing business strategy.
Through his agenting of Hooper’s True Crime, Wylie perhaps inadver-
tently foregrounded how out of date Australia’s (and, by analogy, those
of other post-colonial countries of the Anglosphere) traditional opposing
68 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers

Figure 2.3 The Wylie Agency’s homepage, graphically signalling global

ambition

paradigms for thinking about culture had become by the opening years of
the twenty-first century: on one hand the fading colonial inferiority com-
plex famously dubbed ‘the cultural cringe’ and, on the other, the 1970s-
era cultural nationalist battle cry of Australians as their own cultural
arbiters, presiding over a unified and clearly geographically defined cul-
tural domain (Phillips, 1958). In a rapidly globalising world, both exist-
ing paradigms are manifestly cramping and nonsensical for aspiring
post-colonial writers seeking maximum exposure to cosmopolitan
audiences. Such literary readerships are more likely to self-identify along
lines of literary tastes than with any monolithic concept of a nationally
endorsed cultural identity. In this respect, Hooper’s native Australia may
conceivably stand in not just for other Commonwealth territories but for
any number of other countries formerly dependencies of European-
centred empires.
A text’s pungently authentic sense of place remains as powerful a lure
as ever for readers of literary fiction, and Hooper’s ambitious, gothic-
inflected, true-crime tale plays up the haunted quality of the Tasmanian
landscape as vividly as any nationalist-minded myth-maker of the past. But
whether the actual book in the reader’s hands has been agented, published,
printed, publicised, distributed, sold, consecrated or adapted by cultural
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 69
institutions based in the same country as that depicted in the text remains,
for many twenty-first-century readers (including Australians), a marginal
concern.36 Each of these nodal points in the adaptation industry network
increasingly constitutes merely a portal feeding content into the global
cultural matrix. But, that being said, not all portals in this network are
equally sized or equivalent in power. It is this need – to keep in balance the
proliferating originative sites of global Anglophone culture, and to do
justice to the disparity of various geographical centres in the contemporary
literary field – that constitutes a key ongoing challenge for any would-be
mapping of the adaptation economy.

‘It Will Make a Book for Somebody’:37 PFD, CCS Stellar

and United Agents
The third and final strobe-flash moment in the development of con-
temporary literary representation as a business and cultural force over
the preceding 15 years brings events up to the present. It involves the
2007–08 tripartite dispute between long-established London-based
agency PFD, its recent corporate owner CCS Stellar, and the rival agency,
United Agents, established by PFD staff aggrieved with the direction their
former firm was taking. The unfolding saga was certainly, as regretfully
observed by Joel Rickett, presented in the UK media as a series of very
public jousts between major publishing and media industry personalities,
some of whom had earlier featured in UK agenting’s other cultural freeze-
frame moment, the Wylie/Amis Information fracas of 1995. But the PFD
incident deserves more analytic treatment than it has received to date for
what it reveals about the latest key trend in authorial representation –
literary agencies’ increasing absorption into converged, multimedia agen-
cies representing clients’ work across an array of media sectors. This
narrative of quirky, formerly independent businesses run by rugged
individualists being subsumed into converged, bottom-line-oriented
corporations provides an exact (and ironic) parallel to the debates of the
1980s around independent book publishers’ acquisition by international
media conglomerates. In the 1980s, however, agents were seen as oppor-
tunistic bystanders profiteering from the conglomeration process; by 2008
agents had themselves become the object of the media’s accelerating drive
towards consolidation.
Some background information about the events at PFD is necessary,
especially for audiences outside the hothouse, coterie environment of the
UK book world, to appreciate the macro trends involved. Peters, Fraser
& Dunlop (PFD) has long been established as one of London’s leading
literary, theatrical, film and talent agencies. In 2001, the firm’s directors
sold PFD to the sports and marketing agency CCS Stellar for £12 million
(Byrne, 2007a; 2007b; Dalley, 2007). Yet by 2007, tensions had emerged
between PFD and its new corporate parent over whether profits generated
70 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
by the subsidiary were being sufficiently reinvested in the core agency
business (Marsh, 2007: 4; Dalley, 2007; ‘A Tale’, 2007). After an
attempted £4 million management buyout on the part of PFD was
rejected by CCS Stellar in August 2007, a substantial number of PFD
agents (the exact number was hotly disputed in the media)38 resigned en
masse and established a rival agency under the business name United
Agents (UA) (Byrne, 2007a; Marsh, 2007: 4). Their choice of name was
no doubt a pointed allusion to Charlie Chaplin and other silent-screen
celebrities’ 1919 establishment of their own studio in defiance of the
controlling tactics of the then-emergent Hollywood majors (Look, 1999:
26–27; Rickett, 2008). The fact that one of the senior PFD agents
involved was Pat Kavanagh, formerly Martin Amis’s agent at the time of
The Information’s first publicity, encouraged media commentators to
draw explicit parallels between these two salacious dust-ups in the
normally genteel agenting world (Marsh, 2007: 4).
Around the same time, Caroline Michel, a former UK publishing
executive and immediate ex-Managing Director of the William Morris
Agency UK, was appointed Chief Executive Officer of PFD, presumably
to stem the tide of resignations but, as it eventuated, seemingly exacer-
bating the problem (Byrne, 2007a). A very public battle by media leaks
followed, clearly designed by the warring parties either to encourage
PFD clients to stay where their backlist was held (namely, with PFD), or
to follow their trusted agent (by implication to United Agents) (Boztas,
2007; Franklin, 2007). With negative publicity and a resultant haem-
orrhaging client list significantly debasing PFD’s market value, CCS
Stellar in June 2008 sold the firm for £4 million (the figure rejected in the
earlier failed management buyout) to a group headed by former
newspaper editor and British media powerbroker Andrew Neil (Fenton,
2008; Hoyle, Alberge and Sabbagh, 2008). The new owners then began
protracted litigation with UA over rights to revenue generated under
contracts negotiated by PFD (Caesar, 2008). With Neil in charge of
pursuing the disputed revenues, Michel – calling upon her previous
corporate background – began a public campaign to reposition PFD as a
‘one-stop shop’, or ‘360-degree agency’, focussed on representing clients’
work across all media sectors (Pagano, 2008). This converged uber-
agency strategy was explicitly flagged as an ‘American approach’ and was
clearly modelled on the ‘all-purpose’, multinational agencies such as
William Morris, International Creative Management (ICM) and Intern-
ational Management Group (IMG) that dominate the US media and
entertainment sector (Caesar, 2008; Holt, 1979: 138).
The restructuring and repositioning of PFD are in many ways emblem-
atic of the latest trend in literary representation’s development as a vital
component of the book world and, more recently, of the broader media-
sphere. Even during the 1970s when the US concept of the ‘superagent’
first emerged, such agencies were typically highly personalised small- to
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 71
medium-sized operations, usually run by proprietors who gave their
name(s) to the business. They eagerly sought to ‘package’ books by
brokering combined hardback/paperback rights deals, film and television
spin-offs, and celebrity authorial brands, but these tactics were generally
perceived as dynamic offshoots of an essentially book-centred business
(Holt, 1979: 134; Coser, Kadushin and Powell, 1982: 301). Since the
1970s, the escalating consolidation and conglomeration of media
ownership have brought books into ever-closer proximity to other media
divisions. With the advent of digital technology, the technical basis for
print communication is also now the same as that underpinning all other
media sectors: digitisation. Hence, it was in many ways foreseeable that
the somewhat eccentric, one-(wo)man-shop operations typifying much
literary representation would themselves repeat the pattern of book
publishing’s earlier merger, consolidation and massification. ‘Full-service’
agencies operating across multiple media sectors have maximum incen-
tive to multiformat clients’ creative properties (Wasko, 2003: 20). For
example, at the height of the dispute, Michel was rumoured to be offering
incentive packages to agents staying with PFD to encourage them to
broker screenwriting deals for book content already represented by the
firm, and potentially also involving acting and film-making talent
currently on PFD’s books (Byrne, 2007b; Caesar, 2008). Such a strategy
allows the agency to charge not one, but up to three sets of commission
on a single deal. Moreover, such a converged, multi-sector agency along
US lines is best positioned to engineer its own content ‘packaging’, this
time reaching far beyond the world of books to incubate projects which,
from their inception, span multiple platforms. In the manner of major
contemporary content franchises, such ‘franchisability’ may even con-
stitute a content property’s very raison d’être.39 Such a vision of books as
components in an overarching media system posited upon the principle
of multiple cross-format adaptation raised the familiar, if now rather
threadbare, objection from sections of the British literary establishment
that ‘books are different’.40 Commentators decried what they perceived
as ‘a plan to further “streamline” this still vaguely eccentric and mercurial
industry into a profit-driven conveyor belt in which authors and actors
would be expected to become all-singing, all-dancing “products”’
(Marsh, 2007: 4). The rhetorical echoes here of Diana Athill (2000),
Jason Epstein (2001), André Schiffrin (2001) and others of the ‘lament’
school of publishing critique are unmistakable (Murray, 2006: 127;
Squires, 2007: 13).
It is important, however, to resist some of the oversimplifying binaries
that charactered much UK media coverage of the PFD/UA dispute. There
is no sense that PFD in its earlier incarnation was high-mindedly com-
mitted to preserving literature as a distinct sphere of human communi-
cation, whereas its new management regime under Michel and (later) Neil
was newly intent upon expanding into other, more parvenu media
72 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
sectors.41 PFD had, as mentioned earlier, long been active not only in
literary representation, but also in the theatrical, film and talent agency
sectors of the European market (Dalley, 2007). Nor, conversely, was
Michel’s new phalanx of hires being directed to subordinate books to the
status of mere afterthoughts in the content process, such as tie-in editions
for blockbuster films. The book was still seen by the new generation of
managers at PFD as a generator of prestige and content in its own right.
For example, one of Michel’s early interventions was to appoint an agent
solely responsible for managing rights controlled by literary estates – a
signal that PFD was still keenly focussed upon book clients (and a gesture
that became necessary after UA succeeded in signing the lucrative and
highly active Ian Fleming estate, and an ever-opportunistic Andrew Wylie
poached from PFD the prestigious Evelyn Waugh estate) (Hoyle, Alberge
and Sabbagh, 2008; Addley and Fitzsimmons, 2008; Caesar, 2008).
Nevertheless, it remains broadly true that Michel was recruited to head
PFD precisely because her previous position at the helm of William Morris
UK provided a model for how a European-based, predominantly literary
agency could secure its future in a media environment where any defensive
insistence on books’ uniqueness rings increasingly hollow. With novelist
clients who also write screenplays, authors avid for their work to be
adapted to film, television and even gaming formats, and publishers
seeking eagerly to capitalise on a successful adaptation through tie-in
editions, published screenplays or companion titles, positioning book
content as obdurately format-specific fundamentally misunderstands the
nature of digital technology, the brand loyalty of audiences, and the
imperatives of the contemporary commercial media’s operating environ-
ment. Just as authors once loyally followed their editors from house to
house, so now they follow their agent as agency partnerships dissolve and
form anew. And just as in-house editors once voiced their hostility to the
upstart book-world interloper of the literary agent, so now literary agents
vent their hostility towards allegedly crass and money-grubbing agents
from the formerly more removed worlds of talent, film and television
representation. Agents, it would seem, have thus been hoist with their own
petard. Long justifying their incursion into an overly-nostalgic publishing
industry on the basis that new times called for new business measures, they
find themselves unable to invoke traditionalist arguments now their own
position is threatened with eclipse by a still-newer business model.
The purpose of the foregoing case study – indeed of all three case studies
analysed here – is not to weigh in and take up cudgels for either side, but
to demonstrate how subject to fluctuation are the various stakeholder
positions within the adaptation industry. This insight reinforces the need
to analyse not only shifts in the content of contemporary media for what
they reveal about host societies, in the manner of so much textually
oriented cultural and media studies work. More broadly, we also need to
consider how the changing structures of the media industries themselves
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 73
crucially influence which media texts become available for critical analysis.
In addition, no part of this complexly interdependent, tightly competitive
field, in the Bourdieusian sense, remains static. The texts moving through
the commercial and institutional apparatus of the adaptation industry are
themselves constantly changing, and so too are the components and rela-
tive influence of the industry stakeholders and networks via which they
move. The word ‘adaptation’, when used in a media context, always
retains an echo of its other, cognate meaning in the discipline of evolu-
tionary biology (Hutcheon, 2006: 176–77), as noted in this volume’s
Introduction. In just such a manner, we need to learn to conceptualise the
media adaptation industry as a complexly interdependent and dynamic
phenomenon – namely, as a cultural ecosystem.

Conclusion
In 1975, an article in the UK publishing industry’s trade journal, The
Bookseller, celebrated 100 years of literary agency A.P. Watt’s operations
(Rubinstein, 1975). Its author forecast: ‘it seems probable that the service
which A.P. Watt began to render authors a hundred years ago will be
increasingly in demand in the years ahead’ (2358). It was a prediction that
has proven stunningly accurate; not only is the A.P. Watt agency a
thriving force in international author representation, but the industry
that Watt pioneered has grown to become in many ways the power centre
of the contemporary book world.42 I have utilised the three agenting
controversies explored here as cultural freeze-frame moments emblema-
tising key events and transitions in the agenting business over the previous
15 years. Curiously, the three incidents have been spaced at intervals of
roughly six or seven years, long enough for the literary agent to have
faded from the forefront of public consciousness, but not long enough for
the outline of preceding agent dust-ups to have been entirely forgotten.
Thus, through explicitly linking these three incidents, I have relied upon
an underpinning agenting narrative detectable in journalistic coverage, in
which the combatants of previous stand-offs reappear in subsequent
conflicts in altered, though not entirely dissimilar, roles. This coterie cast
of characters in the narrative of agency over the previous decade-and-a-
half suggests that such strobe-flash moments not only frame in dramatic
tableaux industry developments which normally pass too incrementally
to be observed clearly; they also function as a form of ritual bloodletting
where members of what are in reality tightly interdependent (even
incestuous) creative industries are permitted to air publicly long-standing
grievances which spring from certain players’ longitudinal gains and
encroachments on other stakeholders’ relative power. Thus the three
agenting controversies analysed in detail here are doubtless sparked in
part by inter-personal hostilities, but also by the bruised amour propre of
other book- and media-world interests.
74 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers
That so many professional egos should have been damaged during the
course of the agent’s growth testifies to how rapidly agenting’s sphere of
influence has expanded. The Information incident demonstrated indis-
putably that the agent had become a celebrity in his own right, even in the
resolutely author-centric world of literary fiction (Merritt, 2007). This
agenting celebrity also overflowed the boundaries of national book cultures
(always more an imaginary construct than industry reality), debunking
the UK book world’s illusion of self-sufficiency, and exposing newly estab-
lished post-colonial national cultural spheres to the destabilising forces of
globalisation. The latest of agenting’s waves of expansion has seen literary-
centred agencies moving ever closer to converged multi-sectoral enterprises
boasting representation across the worlds of books, screen media, music,
talent, sport and celebrity appearances. The agent has been in large part a
beneficiary of the increasing enmeshment of the book with other media
formats since the 1980s’ waves of conglomeration; the PFD crisis demon-
strated that agents would not themselves be immune to the process.
Precisely why this rapid book-world transition has taken place over a
remarkably condensed timeframe can be answered with reference to a
passing comment made by early US ‘superagent’ and practising commer-
cial lawyer, Morton L. Janklow. In a 1985 article describing the (then still
comparatively novel) role of the contemporary literary agent, Janklow
referred casually – but tellingly – to ‘the variety of rights being sold under
the guise of a book’ (408). This reconceptualisation of the book not as a
semi-sacred cultural artefact, but as a package of dematerialised, exploit-
able IP rights was the key condition precedent underpinning the expo-
nential growth of the agent since the 1970s. Such a rights bundle com-
prises, firstly, book-related rights of the kind that had long been standard
in book-world contracts: hardback rights, paperback rights, foreign
edition rights, translation rights, and book club rights. But, crucially,
Janklow and his agenting peers also foresaw the pivotal importance of
book contracts’ proliferating rights to control book content in extra-book
formats: serialisation rights, film, TV and cable rights, as well as now
digital rights, merchandising rights, computer gaming, character, prequel
and sequel rights (1985: 407). Once the familiar cultural object of the
book is rethought in this dematerialised, fissiparous manner, hiring of an
agent to manage and account for these myriad rights becomes common-
sensical, if not professionally essential. Symbiotically, once agents were
commercially established, they had every incentive to enhance the range
of rights that could be spun out of book content. The chicken-and-egg
relationship between agents and rights gave even leading New York
literary agent Lynn Nesbit pause as long ago as 1980, as she perceived the
risk of publishing being reduced to ‘just a software arm of the entertain-
ment business’ (Kleinfield, 1980: 9).
Yet even Nesbit, now joint director with Janklow of Janklow & Nesbit
Associates, would acknowledge that the media industry into which books
 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers 75
have become subsumed is not all bad news for literary authors. Nesbit’s
own clients, amongst them Hunter S. Thompson and Jeffrey Eugenides,
have had their reputations enhanced by praised film adaptations of their
work, and such cinematic esteem has built a virtuous circle benefiting
their publishers through enhanced backlist publicity, tie-in editions and
author celebritisation. Certainly, adaptation as a process existed long
before the agent’s emergence in the nineteenth century, appropriation and
reworking of cultural materials being evidently fundamental to the inter-
textual dynamic characterising culture itself. But the greatly enhanced
scale and accelerating pace of the adaptation industry since the 1970s can
only be properly understood in tandem with the rise of the literary agent.
Of all the stakeholders in the adaptation industry – authors, editors, pub-
lishers, prize committees, screenwriters, producers, distributors and con-
sumers – agents have registered the largest increase both in overall
numbers and in industry profile over the past 40 years. Agents’ view of
book contracts as bundles of IP rights not only revolutionised conceptions
of publishing, but also put legally and financially savvy agents in charge
of the media industries’ new currency – rights. Finally, this newly won
industrial and legal centrality empowered agents to broker cross-media
deals amongst adaptation industry stakeholders, and even to catalyse such
deals from a project’s inception. Leading agents now typically angle to
represent the maximum tranche of ‘world rights’ in agreements with
author–clients. This is a mark of the most powerful agents’ newly culti-
vated global geographical reach. It could equally, however, be read as a
register of agents’ collective ambition for their industry in the converged
landscape of the twenty-first-century mediasphere.
3 Making Words Go Further
Book Fairs, Screen Festivals
and Writers’ Weeks as Engine
Rooms of Adaptation

What author doesn’t hope for a successful adaptation of his novel,

what publishing company isn’t pleased to do a good deal and what
producer is not delighted to have a good box office success or good
viewing figures?
Of course there are differing individual interests and they make
themselves felt during contract negotiations. It’s like any other business:
everyone represents their own interests. But the numerous successful film
adaptations worldwide demonstrate that despite some marathon negotia-
tions, the film and book world[s] depend upon one another.
(Petra Hermanns, German film and television agent,
Frankfurt Book Fair Newsletter, 2005)

Within the academic discipline of literary studies, there is an increas-

ing shift away from the traditional syllabus-constructing convenience of
dividing subject matter along national lines into discrete categories of
‘British literature’, ‘American literature’ or, more recent and oppositional
intellectual formulations, ‘Irish literature’, ‘Canadian literature’ and
‘Australian literature’. Such contemporary trends in disciplinary self-
conception and programme structure draw in part on longer-running
academic traditions of comparative literary studies, especially in the
specialism’s traditional heartland of North America. More specifically,
the new, consciously internationalist current in literary analysis derives
from participants’ observations of the cultural world around them, in
which genres, fashions, authorial careers and readerships demonstrably
elude neat country-specific pigeonholes. Within a single-language market,
such as the Anglosphere, cross-border traffic of texts is readily apparent,
with boundaries between formerly nationally-defined markets becoming
increasingly porous (as explored in Chapter 2). More broadly, practices
of rapid and simultaneous translation of texts into multiple languages
soon after first publication have begun to accelerate the emergence of a
global literary culture. French literary critic Pascale Casanova, celebrating
criticism’s sloughing off of the straightjacketing nation-state mentality,
speaks glowingly of a ‘world literary space’ in which texts, authorial
influences and markers of prestige float free of national boundaries,
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 77
meshing in a great web of cross-cultural exchanges (2004 [1999]: 3). In
sympathy with such a manoeuvre, although better attuned to material-
ist analysis than Casanova’s exclusively discursive level of concern,
Canadian scholar Sarah Brouillette analyses the transnational profile of a
particular literary sub-genre – post-colonial writing, specifically that
written in English. Neatly encapsulated in the title of her book, Post-
colonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007), this innately
transnational field forms the necessary backdrop against which contem-
porary star post-colonial authors’ works demand to be – and increasingly
are – read.
Such jettisoning of national in favour of international or global frame-
works may serve to stroke the disciplinary ego of adaptation studies. After
all, the discipline has been ahead of the curve in its enthusiastic embrace
of transnational and cross-cultural analyses since the 1980s’ ‘Impact of
the Posts’ which used non-hierarchically oriented post-structuralist and
cultural studies conceptions of cultural production to track the migration
of particular stories or narrative ‘memes’ across cultures (Stam and
Raengo, 2005: 8; Hutcheon, 2006). Yet adaptation studies should resist
the temptation to gloat at theoretically outpacing its literary studies
stablemate. For adaptation studies has been remarkably reluctant to peer
beneath the surface of the many texts transposed across languages and
cultures to examine the underpinning institutional mechanisms that make
such migrations possible, especially for contemporary texts. This chapter
examines three international fora which collectively make up the engine
rooms of the contemporary adaptation industry: book fairs; screen
festivals; and writers’ weeks. While the authors and agents examined in
the two preceding chapters are undeniably vital figures in the culture of
contemporary adaptation, it is these three fora that constitute the locus at
which the various actors in the adaptation industry convene to trade
rights, incubate adaptation projects and market these back to key audi-
ence sectors. By recalibrating adaptation studies to examine the role and
workings of such fora, this chapter (and the present book as a whole)
seeks to shift academic attention from a near-exclusive preoccupation
with individual texts as the dominant unit of analysis, to understand the
system through which such texts move. In so doing not only can adapta-
tion studies begin to perceive more accurately the impact of this encom-
passing system on the semiotic surface of individual texts; it can moreover
begin to comprehend how the adaptation industry functions systemically
to favour, exclude or generally shape the range of texts available. In a
Bourdieusian sense, the aim of the current discussion is thus to map the
encompassing ‘field’ of adaptations rights-dealing.
Upon examining these three adaptation fora individually, most striking
is that each of them is governed by the model of the circuit. The circuit
charts an annual loop of related events distinguished from each other by
their location, time of year, duration, size, age and perceived prestige as
78 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
calculated relative to other nodes on the circuit. For example, the annual
circuit of major international book fairs is composed of the Bologna
Children’s Book Fair in March, the London Book Fair in April,
BookExpo America in May and, the largest of them all, the Frankfurt
Book Fair in October. Similarly, the seasonal rhythms of film industry
professionals are governed by the annual circuit of ‘A’-film festivals
including Berlin in February, Cannes in May, Venice in August, Toronto
in September, as well as the non-A-ranked but creatively and financially
important Sundance Film Festival for independent productions held in
Utah each January. Less well known than the above examples – perhaps
because of the lower wattage of star power involved – is the international
literary festival circuit that takes place in Australia’s Adelaide Writers’
Week in March, the Sydney Writers’ Festival in mid May, the Hay
Festival (UK) in late May, the Edinburgh International Book Festival in
August, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, also held in August, and
Toronto’s International Festival of Authors in October. Relations
between festivals on the same circuit are typically rivalrous, with intense
competition to secure the biggest-name attendees, much jockeying for
preferable positions in the calendar, and concerted wooing of various
public- and private-sector sources of subsidy and sponsorship (Owen,
2006: 80). But instances of cooperation between events on the same
circuit are not unknown, particularly where audience catchments are
deemed to be primarily local/national, such as the August 2008 live link-
up between the Edinburgh and Melbourne writers’ festivals for an
interview with star author Salman Rushdie.1
An intriguing recent development, central to the analysis that follows,
is the increasing interpenetration of these various industry-defined circuits
through cooperation, joint hosting of events and co-branding initiatives.
Specifically, this has taken the form of book fairs and film festivals joining
forces by dedicating one day of their respective programmes to developing
cross-industry seminars, or the establishment at such festivals of sidebar
events dedicated to adaptation rights-dealing. There are multiple motiva-
tions for these alliances across traditional industry silos. In part they are
attributable to individual festivals’ attempts to steal the limelight from
circuit rivals by expanding their areas of interest, and thus their potential
range of sponsors and delegates. Partly also, inter-circuit alliances may be
spurred by anxieties of medium obsolescence, as with book fairs’ co-
operation with film festivals to rebrand themselves as cross-format rights
marketplaces.2 But more pervasively, the shift from sector-specific to
transmedia perspectives – as with literary studies’ change from nationalist
to internationalist paradigms – is driven by changes in the encompassing
cultural environment, in which formerly hard and fast distinctions
between media sectors make decreasing sense in an era of digital media
convergence, transnational media conglomerates and globally mobile
creative talent. Taken together, these cross-sectoral interlinkages aim to
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 79
formalise and concentrate the previously haphazard encounters of the
book and screen industries, and thus to catalyse the adaptation process.
But drawing such institutional and economic structures into adaptation
studies’ sphere of concern, I hope to delineate the powerful but little
analysed global stock exchange for trade of rights in cultural properties.
For Pierre Bourdieu, such ‘fields’ tend to be characterised by an inverse
relationship between forms of economic and cultural capital, around
which twin poles congregate ‘opposing camps’ of avant-garde and
bourgeois cultural producers (1993: 101; 82–104). But in examining the
role of the three selected fora in the trade of literary properties, it becomes
readily apparent that markers of cultural prestige (such as international
book awards) serve in practice to amplify a property’s desirability for
translation, foreign rights sales and potentially lucrative screen adaptation
(an issue explored further in Chapter 4). Conceptualising the fora of the
book fair, the screen festival and the literary festival as a vital ‘network
of cultural intermediaries’ demonstrates how the category of ‘literature’
is actively brokered, challenged and reformulated within a contemporary
industrial and cultural context (Thompson, 2005: 33). In a very real sense
it permits us a sociological window onto the making of the literary.

The Cinema and Literature International Forum:

‘A Veritable Bank of Ideas for the Film Industry’3
Over the preceding decade, the unmistakable trend in the adaptation
industry has been away from serendipitous encounters between book and
screen industry personnel in traditional media haunts towards formally
convened, consciously stage-managed cross-sector events. In short, the
adaptation industry has gone professional. British novelist Mil Millington
provided an excellent example of just how serendipitous and informal
such book-screen rights networking has tended to be in the past in his
presentation to the ‘Lost in Adaptation’ symposium held in Birmingham,
UK in December 2005. Millington described how publishers talking
enthusiastically in a London bar about the first draft of his comic novel
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (2002) (itself based on
his website of the same name) were overheard by a producer from lead-
ing UK production outfit Working Title, who subsequently contacted
Millington through his agent and purchased the film rights. Millington
was thereafter contracted to write a draft of the Working Title screenplay
(Millington, 2005). Such haphazard communications between the book
and screen industries about ‘adaptation-ready’ properties will no doubt
continue to occur, but the formalisation and professionalisation of this
process via book fairs and screen festivals have changed both the pace and
scale of such discussions. In the future, an increasingly larger proportion
of the trade in adaptation looks set to be incubated at consciously choreo-
graphed cross-industry fora.
80 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
The forerunner of the many such contemporary adaptation-themed
industry events is the Forum International Cinéma et Littérature (Cinema
and Literature International Forum (CLIF)), first staged in October 2001
in the European principality of Monaco (Masters, 2001; Nesselson,
2001).4 Over the course of its first three-day programme, the CLIF
brought together publishers, literary agents, screen producers, directors,
scriptwriters, authors and distributors to discuss and transact the busi-
ness of adaptation. Influenced by its location, attendance at this first
iteration of the CLIF was predominantly Francophone, with a smaller
representation of Anglosphere delegates (Rickett, 2006: 18). The event
was convened by French film industry public relations professional
Claire Breuvart with backing from the principality’s government and the
patronage of Monaco’s film-identified royal family, with the intention of
making the CLIF ‘the leading international market for audiovisual
writing. . . . Writers, publishers and directors are an obvious fit, and yet
nobody’s tried to bring them together before’ (Nesselson, 2001: 17). This
cross-sectoral rationale is constantly re-emphasised in the CLIF’s annual
posters, which have come to feature some variation on an open book
resting on a canvas director’s chair, with the famed waters of the Côte
d’Azur sparkling enticingly in the background.
Held annually since 2001 (with the exception of an unexplained hiatus
in 2003), the CLIF offers a programme combining panel sessions
featuring book and screen industry representatives, pitching sessions in
which publishers pitch adaptable books to film and television producers,
and one-on-one meetings between delegates to hammer out adaptations
deals. As the CLIF has grown, the programme has become both more
diverse, taking in the many additional formats to which creative content
now migrates, as well as more explicitly commercial. An International
Literary Adaptation Market was added in 2002, modelled on similar
events at large film festivals such as Cannes in which properties are
licensed for distribution in new markets; a Remake Market was added in
2006 for ‘adaptations’ of existing films to new versions created in the
same medium; and since 2009 the cartoon and video game stream has
become increasingly prominent, reflecting vital new markets for the
adaptation of both print and audio-visual content (Sidhva, 2004; Masters,
2006; Cinema and Literature International Forum, 2007).5 Prior to each
year’s event, publishers submit materials for the CLIF pitch catalogue,
listing targeted book properties available for adaptation and providing for
each title a plot synopsis, author bionote, territorial rights information
and contact details for the film rights holder (Sidhva, 2004; Besserglik,
2005).6
Most intriguing are the attempts by the CLIF, as a still new event, to
generate symbolic capital in the form of annual prizes. The Forum awards
a growing body of prizes each year, including awards for Best Literary
Adaptation for Cinema Film, Best Literary Adaptation for Television,
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 81
Best Scriptwriter of Literary Adaptations, Best Producer of a Literary
Adaptation for Cinema, Best Actor in a Literary Adaptation and a Career-
long Achievement Trophy of Honour. Additionally, there are artfully
named awards for Best Adaptable Novel and for Best Adaptable
Comic/Graphic Novel, designed as obvious lures to producers present (or
elsewhere) to purchase rights to a promising print property (Besserglik,
2005; Cinema and Literature International Forum, 2007). More broadly,
these last two awards are also designed to reinforce the CLIF’s claim to
be the pre-eminent forum for adaptations rights-dealing. The aspiration
is that properties winning the awards will be fast-tracked for cross-format
adaptation through displaying their newly acquired prize status and,
conversely, that through the success of such adaptations the name of the
Forum will become more widely known and its status in the annual book
and film industry circuits will become more assured. Optimally, the
process thus works to create a virtuous circle. The CLIF’s tactic does
appear to be paying dividends: French novelist Gilles Legardinier’s novel
L’Exil des anges (2009) (pitched as The Angel’s Exile) was pre-selected
for the CLIF’s Best Adaptable Novel award in 2009, information proudly
flagged on the pitch package prepared by the online adaptation-facili-
tating company Best-seller-to-Box-office.7 The book was subsequently
selected as one of 12 promisingly adaptable properties for the much larger
Berlin International Film Festival’s 2009 ‘Books at Berlinale’ sidebar
event.8
But, as an interloper onto both the book and screen industry cir-
cuits, the CLIF’s relationship to other major industry fora can never be
straightforward. It is a very recent entrant to a calendar structured around
much longer established events (the Cannes Film Festival was first staged
in 1946; the Frankfurt Book Fair’s modern incarnation dates from 1949).
As such, the CLIF is obliged to be tactical and opportunistic. Thus the first
CLIF was staged in October 2001, in a patent attempt to attract European
and, specifically, transatlantic publishing and screen industry personnel in
Europe for the late-October Frankfurt Book Fair (Vaucher, 2001). The
CLIF has for several years now convened in March/April, presumably in
an attempt, once again, to piggyback on (North American) industry traffic
to the London Book Fair in April and so to offer publishers’ travel budgets
the advantage of participating in two industry fora for close to the price
of one. Rivalries and tensions are rarely aired publicly in such inter-
connected industries. Frankfurt Book Fair representatives have, for
example, sat on CLIF panels, and Claire Breuvart, in recent comments,
seems consciously to be positioning the CLIF in geographical, temporal
and industrial terms in relation to the Cannes Film Festival: ‘The Forum’s
future direction will be to focus on film financing. . . . If Cannes is at the
end of the filmmaking process, we want to make Monaco a centre for film
creation, from finding the right story to adapt, to securing the funds to
make it onto the screen’ (Sidhva, 2004). But detectable beneath each
82 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
expression of complementarity is the evident desire to distinguish the
CLIF from its competitor events, including by reconstituting its boutique
size as a unique selling point, as in Forum Director-General Hans-Stephan
Kreidel’s remarks:

Our specificity, compared with book fairs like Frankfurt or festivals

like Cannes, is that here we provide the quality time and calm that
are needed for publishers and producers to work together and reflect.
If it works out, it’s a meeting of kindred spirits.
(Besserglik, 2005: 14)9

Innovative in being the first dedicated event for catalysing adaptations

deal making, the CLIF nevertheless has to tread warily to mark out its
own territory in the already crowded cultural industries field. Similarly,
formerly single-industry events stand poised to imitate the CLIF’s suc-
cesses and to appropriate for themselves its cachet of adaptation industry
innovation.

Book Fairs: ‘A Pool of Rights Available Worldwide’10

The lynchpins of the international publishing calendar are the vast book
fairs at which publishers, editors, agents, retailers and technology pro-
viders convene in order to assess industry trends, network with inter-
national peers and, most importantly, negotiate the buying and selling of
foreign territory and translation rights (Bing, 2000). As alluded to earlier,
the major ‘A’ book fairs include Frankfurt, London, Bologna (for
children’s books), BookExpo America (for North American rights) and
Guadalajara, Mexico (for Spanish-language titles) – and roughly in that
order of precedence (Think, 2007: 8). But beyond these tent-pole events
lies an array of smaller, often regionally or nationally focussed book fairs
convened in locations as diverse as Cairo, Cape Town, Moscow, Beijing,
Abu Dhabi, Warsaw, Jerusalem, Madrid, New Delhi and Prague, many
of which model their structure and rhetoric after the major events. There
is general consensus, however, that the mighty Frankfurt Book Fair is the
pre-eminent event in the book-publishing calendar, judged according to
scale, longevity, its genuinely global cross-section of delegates, and the
volume of rights business transacted in the German city each October
(Obidike, 1980; Weeks, 1985; Catchpole, 1992; Staunton, 1996; Perman,
1998; Blake, 1999; Jakubowski, 2007).
Frankfurt has long constituted a fascinating microcosm of the book
industry at transitional moments in its development. The Frankfurt
Book Fair’s origins date back to the medieval period (contemporary Fair
directors insistently work into their public speeches some reference to
Gutenberg’s display of his printed Bible at the Frankfurt Fair in the
1450s). This was followed by several centuries of eclipse by the rival
Leipzig Book Fair. But the Frankfurt Book Fair was subsequently revived
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 83
in the aftermath of World War Two – emerging ‘like a phoenix’ of
cultural pride from the ruins of Goethe’s shattered city (Weidhaas, 2007:
15). In its modern incarnation, the Fair focussed initially on trade between
German publishers and booksellers (Maschler, 2005: 265; Weidhaas,
2007: 206). It was only during the 1950s and particularly the 1960s that
the international orientation of the Fair became its defining feature, a
development carefully cultivated through Fair directors’ selection of an
annual national or regional ‘Guest of Honour’, beginning with ‘Latin
American Literature’ in 1976, followed by ‘Black Africa’ in 1980, and
featuring recently (and controversially) the 2009 choice of China (Perl,
1967; Abel, 1996: 92; Weidhaas, 2007: 149; 2009: 32–34).11
If Frankfurt represents the global book trade brought together in one
place – ‘a mighty map of the publishing world’ in the resonant phrase of
Australian former publisher and cultural commentator Hilary McPhee –
it equally bears out the structural inequalities and centre–periphery
dynamics of that volatile cultural field (2001: 198). In the most evocative
and astute account of the atmosphere and politics of Frankfurt to be
found anywhere, McPhee memorably recalls the colonial riff-raff of the
Anglophone book world – the Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians,
Scots and Irish – bonding and commiserating over their banishment to
one of the Book Fair’s farthest-flung exhibition halls. For these ‘feeders’
of emergent writers ripe for multinational picking, too-often reluctant
distributors of foreign titles republished under grudgingly granted licence
from London or New York, the Frankfurt experience powerfully rein-
forced their status as satellites to the global publishing metropoles:

the independent publishers from the fringes . . . congregated

together, Fosters in hand, eventually confessing in the accents of
Edinburgh, Dublin, Sydney and Toronto how few deals they’d
actually managed to clinch. Australia and Canada and a few other
‘emerging’ publishing centres had national stands where the
independent publishers pooled their resources to save money. . . . But
nothing really helped to ease the torture: the crucial thing was not to
show you were feeling it.
(2001: 202–03)

Reverential allusions to Gutenberg aside, the contemporary Frankfurt

Book Fair has transcended the medium of the book itself to focus
principally on the buying and selling of intellectual property (IP) rights
deriving from books, what British cultural sociologist J.B. Thompson,
reworking Bourdieu’s terminology, terms ‘intellectual capital’ (2005: 31).
Terry Cochran, another of the mere handful of academic commentators
on book fairs, similarly emphasises their role in the trading of immaterial
property rights. Although, unlike Thompson, Cochran subjects this prac-
tice to an explicitly political economy critique:
84 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
international book fairs do not generally translate into direct sales to
a consumer; the fairs’ primary focus relates to the management of
ideas, whether the motivation derives from a desire for profit or the
promotion of certain interpretations of history, politics, literature,
and so forth.
(1990: 6–7)

The Fair expends limited energy extolling the virtues of great literature as
such – it is, after all, a trade event driven by sales rather than by aesthetic
judgements. Rather, the Fair promotes the continuing value of books as
rights bundles, aiming to catalyse ‘the exploitation of literary works in a
variety of forms’ (Owen, 2006: 28). Former Frankfurt Director and now
historian of the Fair, Peter Weidhaas, dates this incremental shift in the
Fair’s self-definition to the wave of publishing conglomerations underway
from the mid 1960s:

a development took shape that saw books, not as the independent

medium they had been for centuries, but rather as a component of the
communications industry – that vast entertainment behemoth that
included media, television, film, music, reviews, and illustrated maga-
zines, and eventually the entire spectrum of electronically generated
media.
(2007: 248–49)

By the 1990s, this massification of the book had come to be accompanied

by a dematerialisation, driven by the mainstream uptake of digital media
technologies:

Increasingly the individual product – the book itself – lost signifi-

cance. ‘It is not a question of books, but of rights!’ These rights –
sometimes including the digital version of a book – could be freely
converted, transferred worldwide, and exchanged through the use of
various media.
(Weidhaas, 2007: 256)

Encapsulating this shift, Frankfurt now self-describes as ‘the most impor-

tant marketplace for books, media, rights and licences worldwide’,12 a
cross-media rebranding neatly echoed in the slogan sported by Frankfurt’s
main competitor, the London Book Fair, for its 2010 iteration: ‘Making
words go further’.13
Frankfurt’s restyling of itself as a rights marketplace captures in
microcosm the adaptation industry’s twenty-first-century view of the
book: that of a content platform interlinked with more recently emerged
media through networks of IP rights dealing. Precisely calibrating this
emerging trend, Frankfurt has over recent decades added a number of
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 85
components to the overarching Book Fair event to facilitate international
trade in book-derived content. Since 1978, Frankfurt has hosted an
International Literary Agents and Scouts Centre which now occupies half
a floor of a vast exhibition hall and offers a huge number of desks
(organised with Teutonic precision by row and place number) for literary
agents to stage back-to-back half-hourly meetings with publishers and
other agents to negotiate sale of rights. Similarly, Frankfurt has since
1986 hosted an International Rights Directors Meeting for publishing
house rights managers to discuss macro-level trends in the trade and
management of book content (Kim, Moura and Owen, 2004: 44;
Nawotka, 2008: 124). The Fair’s most intriguing recent innovation has
been the establishment of the Comics Centre, introduced in 2000 and
rapidly expanding year on year. It is especially popular with the younger
German public who are permitted admission to the Fair on the weekend
of its fourth and fifth days, and a significant percentage of whom dress up
in elaborate cosplay outfits modelled on their favourite manga and comics
characters. From the trade point of view, the establishment of the Comics
Centre (currently housed in a section of one of the major halls dedicated
to European publishing) acknowledges the surging popularity of comics
and graphic novels as a segment of the print culture market, especially
amongst the child and young adult audiences which make up the indus-
try’s future mainstream demographic. In part the Comics Centre is also
designed to facilitate repurposing of print-based comics material for the
screen industries, specifically film, television, animation and computer
gaming (Weidhaas, 2007: 222).14 It is enticing to speculate how many of
comics adaptations currently flooding multiplex screens around the world
could date their incubation to cross-media deal making at industry events
such as Frankfurt, and how the growing success of comics adaptations
reciprocally fuels the rapid expansion of Frankfurt’s specialist comics
forum.
The above innovations notwithstanding, Variety correspondent
Jonathan Bing was correct in cautioning readers of the film industry bible
back in 2000 that ‘The vast majority of rights transactions in the fair’s
cavernous exhibition halls will be dedicated to foreign sales, and . . . that
makes film dealings a low priority’ (129). My field research at the 2009
Frankfurt Book Fair confirms this as an accurate representation, although
there are signs that the Fair is attempting to increase the event’s appeal to
screen-industry personnel. Frankfurt’s most recent and concrete mani-
festation of the book’s enmeshment with the broader mediasphere is the
establishment in 2003 of the Film and Media Forum (‘Frankfurt’, 2004;
2005; Hermanns, 2005).15 Allocated its own floor of the Fairground’s
central Forum building, directly below the display of the annual Guest of
Honour, the Film and Media Forum comprises a programme of expert
speaker and panel events on the topic of cross-media adaptation. It
includes a dedicated Rights Centre coordinating 30-minute back-to-back
86 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
pitching sessions between publishers, agents and film producers trading
in book-derived subsidiary rights, as well as the two Book Fair cinemas
that screen films related to the Forum programme. As of 2009, the Film
and Media Forum programme additionally included for the first time
presentations by ‘representatives of the trade of games, merchandising
and music and social platforms’ [sic].16 The following year, the Forum
expanded its cross-sectoral appeal by inaugurating Frankfurt StoryDrive
– a dedicated media conference comprising keynotes, workshops and case
studies revealing ‘the possibilities and opportunities offered by cross-,
trans- and multimedia storytelling’.17
Such cross-media ‘speed dating’ demonstrates most dramatically how
the previously serendipitous and haphazard ‘shopping’ of rights in literary
properties is now increasingly formalised and consciously orchestrated
within the book-fair circuit (‘Frankfurt’, 2005; Owen, 2006: 80). In a
special partnership with the Berlin International Film Festival, Frankfurt’s
Film and Media Forum now moreover declares one day of its calendar
‘Berlinale Day’, hosting a full programme of industry panel sessions,
screenings of adapted properties, and awards for the best literary
adaptation (‘Frankfurt’, 2005; ‘Berlinale’, 2008).18 To my knowledge the
only other academic attention to this fascinating cross-industry develop-
ment comes from UK film producer and professor Roger Shannon in his
May 2007 keynote address to the ‘From the Blank Page to the Silver
Screen: Readaptation’ conference convened by the Université de Bretagne
Sud at Lorient, France:

This attention to adaptation is evident also in the newly arranged

forum that takes place at the annual and prominent Frankfurt Book
Fair, where the Berlin Film Festival now collaborates on the show-
casing of a new movie, based on an adaptation, at the Book Fair, and
uses the event to generate increased ‘heat’ about the relationship
between literature and film.

At the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair, the centrepiece Berlinale Workshop

adaptation case study was the first volume of Swedish crime writer Stieg
Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the international mega-seller The Girl
With the Dragon Tattoo (originally titled Men Who Hate Women) and
its successful 2009 Swedish film adaptation. (Additional Swedish and
English-language film and also television adaptations of the remaining
volumes in the series are also in the works). Eva Gedin, Assisting
Publishing Director of the book’s Swedish publisher Norstedts and Jenny
Gilbertsson of Yellow Bird, the Swedish production house responsible
for director Niels Arden Oplev’s successful film, discussed, inter alia,
coordinating the slew of foreign rights sales for the book at the 2004
Frankfurt Book Fair; the intense interest from film producers stirred by
the strength of pre-publication foreign rights sales; and the optioning of
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 87
film rights to the whole trilogy still before the first book had even been
published. Gilbertsson noted that novelisations of the in-production
Swedish TV series could also be published, though publishing house
Norstedts owns the sequel rights. Yellow Bird, as the film’s producers,
however, owns the remake rights. As Gedin summed up the mutually
beneficial cross-sectoral relationship: ‘The book has been so successful,

Figure 3.1 Berlinale at Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 promotional postcard (front)
© Reproduced by permission of Frankfurter Buchmesse
88 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
and the film has been so successful, and it’s all merged’ (Berlinale, 2009).
Demonstrably true though this win–win logic is, it was evident even in
this panel session that each media sector was nevertheless manoeuvring
to maximise their cut of the Larsson brand and fiercely guarding the rights
that enable this.

Figure 3.2 Rear of postcard, detailing the Film and Media Forum’s 2009 case
study: adapting Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy
© Reproduced by permission of Frankfurter Buchmesse
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 89
Through staging such sessions, the Film and Media Forum’s organisers
clearly aim to cultivate the same symbiotic relationship that drives
Monaco’s CLIF, whereby the success of book–screen adaptations incu-
bated at previous events validates the fair’s self-appointed position as the
pre-eminent adaptations rights market. In the hopeful language of the
1996 seminar that led to the establishment of the Frankfurt–Berlinale
partnership: ‘It Happened in Frankfurt’ (Quinn, 1996: 23). This comple-
mentary relationship between Germany’s two pre-eminent cultural events
has, since 2004, become triangular, with the addition of Nuremberg’s
International Toy Fair supplying further platforms for the licensing – and
derivation – of adaptable media content (Mutter, Zeitchik and Baker,
2004: 12). Such alliances appear to be part of a larger strategic develop-
ment by the Book Fair’s management to remodel Frankfurt as an
‘umbrella event’ hosting multiple specialist sub-fora appealing to different
creative industry sectors, and thus to expand the Fair’s size, catchment
and brand recognition (Staunton, 1996: 10). In keeping with the com-
petitive logic underpinning the literary field, however, Frankfurt’s inno-
vation has been swiftly copied by its major book fair rivals: Publishers
Weekly noted in 2000 that ‘The evolution of the London Book Fair from
a booksellers’ fair toward a rights fair has intensified . . . in recent years’
(Zaleski, 2000: 22). Equally, the organisers of the Bologna Children’s
Book Fair announced in 2003 that they were ‘keen to develop a wider role
for the event as a “children’s content marketplace”, rather than focussing
exclusively on publishing. They hope [to] increase the exchange of copy-
rights between the books sector and TV and film production companies’
(‘Bologna’, 2003: 6). Just as various media sectors jockey to maximise
their financial stake in a successful global franchise, so too the various
engine rooms of adaptation vie to be the epicentre of the global adap-
tation industry.

Online Rights-Trading: ‘As Busy as Frankfurt, Seven

Days a Week, 24 Hours a Day’19
This already complex picture of media sector jostling with media sector
and of book fair competing with book fair was complicated still further
by the emergence, from the late 1990s, of various online rights-trading
websites that promised to shift adaptation’s engine room to the virtual
sphere and so to make it a year-round affair. Adopting the triumphalist
rhetoric characterising the boom years of Web 1.0, the dot.com rights
revolution promised to reduce publishers’ travel and accommodation
expenses through doing away with en masse book fair attendance, and to
increase the accessibility and transparency of information about rights
ownership for all (or at least for those with paid-up subscriptions).
Beginning with the launch of RightsCenter.com in August 1999, the book
industries witnessed the mushrooming of competing online rights dealing
90 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
start-ups including GoodStory.com (established in 2000), Subrights.com
(2000) and RightsWorld.com (2000) (Hilts, 1999; Reid, 2000a; 2000d;
Baker, 2000a; 2000b; Owen, 2001). Frankfurt did not take this rhetorical
and commercial assault on its pre-eminence lying down: as early as 1994
the Fair had issued ‘Virtual Frankfurt Book Fair’, a CD-ROM rights
directory listing titles by all publishers exhibiting at the Fair. Continuing
its campaign to co-opt its upstart rivals’ technological edge, by 1996
‘Virtual Frankfurt’ had shifted to the World Wide Web as a fully search-
able catalogue, and by 2001 the website had been upgraded to support
online real-time rights negotiation and trading (Lottman, 1999; 2001;
Baker, 2000a; Owen, 2001; Weidhaas, 2007: 266).20
The correction to this overcrowded market of competing services all
essentially attempting to corner the same industry demographic came with
the tech-wreck and post-9/11 economic downturn of 2001 (Rosenblatt,
2008). Having burnt through vast amounts of venture capital without
being able to attract a sufficient volume of trade to become viable, all the
enterprises other than the first-launched RightsCentre rapidly folded. UK-
based rights authority Lynette Owen attributes the websites’ collapse to
their founders’ insufficient appreciation of the interpersonal, hand-selling
characteristic of the rights trade:

For those of us in the field, the life blood of rights selling is face to
face discussion with customers at least once a year, and preferably
more often; it is often during the personal encounter that a rights sale
is clinched. No company website or intermediary rights promotion
service can be a substitute for personal knowledge and enthusiasm.
(2001: 174)

Former Frankfurt Director Peter Weidhaas, while admittedly a far from

neutral commentator, avers:

The book trade in general and the rights business in particular are
both contact-intensive and communications-oriented operations of
relative complexity. Any possibility that the real Frankfurt Book Fair
could ever be replaced by an Internet clone is purely and simply a
figment of some futuristic visionary’s fertile imagination.
(2007: 268)21

As so often when revisiting the paradigm-shattering rhetoric of the 1990s

digital mavens, their predictions of a sea-change in the way information
societies would operate have been simultaneously both proven correct
and revealed as a monstrous exaggeration. The tech-wreck survivor
RightsCentre remains a vibrant online business, with its subscription-only
Film Rights Directory (FRD), established in late 2000, now its major
generator of online traffic and revenue (Baker, 2000a; Owen, 2001; Reid,
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 91
2001; Rosenblatt, 2008).22 But equally, the circuit of international book
fairs continues to thrive, with Frankfurt in 2009 recording a staggering
290,000 attendees and 7,300 exhibitors.23 The future of online rights
dealing seems assured as a digital complement to the media industries’
periodic face-to-face gatherings. Perhaps unconsciously echoing a very
Bourdieusian conception of the cultural field – riven by ongoing rivalries
and constant strategising amongst agents to gain tactical advantage –
regular Publishers Weekly contributor Calvin Reid summed up this
complementarity in describing RightsCenter’s prominent self-marketing
at (perhaps ironically) international book fairs. For Reid, online rights-
trading is ‘designed to fit into the book publishing industry’s ecosystem’
(2000b: 14).

Film Festivals: ‘Love Story on the Red Carpet: Book

Meets Film’24
The phenomenon of the film festival is the locus where multiple cultural
and commercial functions intersect: distribution marketplace for inde-
pendent productions and informal distribution network; barometer of
cinematic esteem as measured by awards and prizes; venue for the dis-
covery and consecration of film-making talent; publicity and marketing
launch pad; source of film financing and packaging; focus of campaigns
of civic or even national rebranding; spotlight on social and political
issues; and medium for cosmopolitan identity affirmation for often afflu-
ent cinephilic audiences and the sponsors who seek their brand loyalty
(Wasko, 2003; Wong, 2008; Kaufman, 2009). The tensions generated by
these competing motivations, along with the ever-greater visibility of film
festivals in the mainstream media, have made critical analysis of film
festivals a rich and currently burgeoning subfield within cinema studies
research (De Valck, 2007; Iordanova and Rhyne, 2009; Porton, 2009a;
2009b). But even as such film scholars rightly lament the paucity of
academic attention to the now decades-old phenomenon of the film
festival, they have to date paid almost no attention to another role of film
festivals – that of mediator of film’s relationship to the book and other
media sectors, chiefly through their emergence as adaptation rights fairs.
The mirror image of October’s ‘Berlinale Day’ at the Frankfurt Book
Fair is February’s ‘Books at Berlinale’ event at the Berlin International
Film Festival (BIFF), ‘a kind of exchange program’ announced in 2004
and first convened in 2005 (‘Frankfurt’, 2004; Mutter, Zeitchik and
Baker, 2004: 12; Hermanns, 2005). Although the Berlinale’s participation
in the Frankfurt Book Fair dates back to 2003, this more recent two-way
consolidation of the relationship arose from a widespread perception
that the book and film industries typically frequent separate industry
events, rarely encountering each other or forging cross-media networks
(‘Frankfurt’, 2004; 2005; Hermanns, 2005). This need to stage regular
92 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
and adaptation-focussed liaison between professionals in the two indus-
tries is captured in remarks by German film and television agent Petra
Hermanns, who emphasises the vital importance of representatives of the
two industries ‘get[ting] to know one another and talk[ing] about it
amongst themselves, at forums and festivals’ (2005). Hence ‘Books at
Berlinale’ conceives of itself very consciously as helping ‘successful books
enjoy a second life on the silver screen or TV’ (‘Frankfurt’, 2005). The
‘Books at Berlinale’ programme includes a chosen adaptation case study
(in 2009 the post-Holocaust drama and German–US–Israeli co-production
Adam Resurrected (2008)), a range of panel discussions and one-on-one
‘speed dating sessions’ between rights managers and film scouts and
producers (“Frankfurt’, 2005). In ‘Books at Berlinale’’s dedicated ‘Books
at Breakfast’ event, publishers pitch their top 12 adaptable bestsellers to
assembled film producers. The organisers’ selection from all titles sub-
mitted for consideration by international publishers comprises ten adult
titles and two children/young adults titles (the former category included,
in 2009, Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winner The White Tiger).25
In pitching the event to the Berlinale’s primary audience of film producers,
the organisers of ‘Books at Breakfast’ repeatedly emphasise both the pre-
publication, first-look newness and the established print-culture cre-
dentials of the material, even where these two qualities would seem to be
in contradiction:

The books to be presented are all bestsellers, award-winners, or

brand-new publications, meaning that the producers also have the
exclusive opportunity to secure film rights early, before the book hits
the market. The books selected combine literary quality, popular
success and a high screen adaptability.
(‘Berlinale’, 2009)

Desirable as is this shift away from ad hoc and individually initiated

cross-industry exchanges to ‘the intensification and professionalisation of
contacts between the two industries’, the phenomenon nevertheless raises
questions about the selecting and filtering role played by such events in
setting the mechanisms of the adaptation industry (‘Frankfurt’, 2005). For
just as Hilary McPhee astutely reads the layout of the book fair hall as an
encapsulation of various regimes of power operative within international
publishing, so too do adaptation-incubating events such as ‘Books at
Berlinale’ bring adaptation closely into contact with a range of economic,
geographical and temporal forces which have not previously marked it so
visibly. Accordingly, adaptation scholars should take an active interest in
the kinds of ‘adaptation-ready’ texts routinely showcased to screen
producers at such events and to weigh to what extent these festival and
market choices influence which films appear at the local multiplex. Nor
is it only a question of how the book industries whittle down the range of
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 93
their product for screen-industry tasting; scholars should equally be
asking how such events’ prioritising of books with ‘exceptional screen
adaptation potential’ might be having a knock-on effect on the book
industry itself, with ‘twin-track’ creators penning both novels and
screenplays simultaneously in order to better their odds of attracting
cultural gatekeepers’ attention (Books, 2009).
The Berlinale is currently the only A-film festival actively showcasing
adaptable book properties, but it is not, as outlined in this chapter’s
earlier discussion of Monaco’s CLIF, the originator of the format. The
Berlinale’s publicists sidestep the issue of their event’s originality through
some careful wording, proclaiming ‘Books at Berlinale’ to be ‘the world’s
first market for literary adaptations to be linked to an A festival’.26
Having thus tried to steal Monaco’s thunder and demote its Francophone
rival in the circuit hierarchy, the Berlinale can hardly object to other
international film festivals mimicking the cross-industry format in their
turn. Since 2007 the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has
hosted ‘Books at MIFF’ in an uncredited Australasian emulation of both
European models. As with the Frankfurt–Berlin alliance, ‘Books at MIFF’
arose from MIFF Director Claire Dobbin’s perception of a problematic
dissociation between the two industries: ‘Publishers and producers never
really have the conversations in Australia. They live in entirely separate
worlds. If we can change this, it will be good for books, good for films
and good for our national culture’ (George, 2007). The feeling is clearly
two-way; Random House Australia Rights Manager Nerrilee Weir has
participated in ‘Books at MIFF’ several times, being aware that publishers
‘don’t have that network at the moment. We really want that dialogue to
be happening’ (‘Books’, 2007: 21). As she elaborates, ‘Books at MIFF’
productively pushes publishers outside of their normal rights-trading
comfort zone:

Film rights are something that you tend to sell almost by default in a
way. You get some people interested, you know you’ve got a prop-
erty, you go to your contacts, but it’s not like selling publishing rights
where you know it inside out. You need somebody who knows who
the players are.
(Weir, 2008)

As a result of participating in ‘Books at MIFF’ in 2007, Random House

Australia produced its first dedicated film rights catalogue – which can of
course also be circulated at book-focussed events such as the Frankfurt
and London book fairs (Meyer, 2008; Random House Australia, 2008).
By the third iteration of ‘Books at MIFF’ in July 2009, the still invitation-
only event had expanded to include 21 publishing companies and literary
agents, 30 Australian and international film financiers and 70 Australian
and New Zealand film producers (George, 2007; ‘MIFF’s’, 2009).
94 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks

Figure 3.3 Front cover of Random House Australia’s Film Rights Catalogue
2010
© Reprinted by permission of Random House Australia
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 95
‘Books at Berlinale’ also has a perceptible cultural nationalist under-
current, with titles from prominent German authors such as Bernhard
Schlink previously listed amongst the 12 chosen titles (an adaptation of
Schlink’s The Weekend is now in production, which organisers attribute
to the book’s earlier showcasing) (Berlinale, 2008; ‘Berlinale’, 2009). But
for the organisers of Australia’s MIFF, the theme of highlighting national
stories to global audiences is an even stronger imperative. This is no doubt
due to Australia’s far smaller domestic market of around 21 million
(compared with Germany’s approximately 81 million) and to the absence
of a regionally distinct language functioning as in-built cultural protec-
tionist measure. But these questions of degree aside, the format of MIFF is
strongly reminiscent of the structure of both its Monaco and Berlin proto-
types: a specialist industry panel analyses a recent adaptation; publishers
pitch to producers ‘titles ripe for screen adaptation’; significant programme
time is allotted to one-on-one rights negotiations; and the event’s organ-
isers produce a catalogue listing rights details of all properties discussed at
the event (‘MIFF’s’, 2009). At previous years’ ‘Books at MIFF’, the case-
study texts selected have included the arthouse period drama Romulus, My
Father (2007), the screen adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-
wining Disgrace (2008) and, in 2009, director Robert Connolly’s thriller
Balibo (2009), based on the true story of the Indonesian military’s murder
of five Australian journalists during the 1975 invasion of East Timor.
Mark Woods, Manager of the MIFF 37° South Market, notes that this
most recent case study undermined the simple unidirectional logic that
often pervades industry discussion of adaptation:

This year our case study was Balibo, which brought the past two
years together in so far as we had a book that led to a leading play-
wright (David Williamson) penning an adaptation with a leading
director (Rob Connolly) and the film then led to another book being
written about the shooting of the film.27

It is striking how closely this multi-trajectional logic echoes the most

recent wave of theorisation in academic adaptation studies, as outlined in
this book’s Introduction. The tired (and never entirely accurate) concept
of content moving from book to film has been jettisoned to acknowledge
that content proliferates across multiple platforms, often simultaneously,
and frequently with print its subsequent not its initial incarnation (see
Chapter 5 for further discussion of this point).
Yet, for all their proliferation and increased scholarly interest, it must
be acknowledged that such film festival publisher–producer meets tend to
remain sidebar events to the screen festival programme proper. This fact
most likely explains film scholars’ neglect of this aspect of the film festival,
accompanied perhaps by the discipline’s lingering desire to get out from
under the skirts of literary studies and its prejudicial medium hierarchies.
96 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
When films derived from books are scheduled in competition at the major
film festivals, their publicity typically positions them as great films, not
explicitly as great adaptations. This is in stark contrast to the Frankfurt
Book Fair’s trumpeting of esteemed film adaptations during its Berlinale
Day events specifically as adaptations from print materials to screen. No
doubt this structural imbalance reflects the greater cultural clout of film
in the twenty-first century compared with the anxiety-ridden book
industry, ever fearful of imminent obsolescence. It is only in rare instances
of a film derived from an autobiographical narrative that film festivals
give red-carpet fanfare to a movie’s credentials as an adaptation, as in the
2007 Cannes Film Festival premiere of Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty
Heart (2007), at which memoirist Mariane Pearl and her young son
appeared side by side on the red carpet with A-list celebrities ‘Brangelina’.
But even here, the choreographed juxtaposition of author and actress is
as much to emphasise Jolie’s bewigged similarity to Pearl in her praised
performance as it is to emphasise the film’s status as an adaptation. With
book publishing lacking the aura of drama and personalisation that

Figure 3.4 Authorial red-carpet appearance: Mariane Pearl and her son Adam
flanked by director Michael Winterbottom, star Angelina Jolie and
producer Brad Pitt at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of A Mighty
Heart (2007)
© Picture Media/REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 97
pervades the film industry, the intervening book becomes significantly
marginalised as a necessary – but ultimately un-photogenic – intermediary
between the main games of real-life drama and its cinematic recreation.

Writers’ Weeks: ‘The World’s Largest Public Celebration

of the Written Word’28
Book fairs and screen festivals as key engine rooms of the adaptation
economy are both industry-focussed, production-oriented events. They
are complemented by the necessary third in this triumvirate – writers’
weeks – where adaptations are less often incubated than marketed to and
evaluated by a key demographic of highly media-literate, often affluent,
early-adopters.29 In common with book fairs and screen festivals, writers’
festivals have suffered from a paucity of academic attention until very
recently. Humanities academics, it might have been thought, fit squarely
within the demographic writers’ festivals seek hardest to attract but,
despite this, Cori Stewart’s recently completed PhD on the topic locates
only a ‘single sustained piece of academic research on writers’ festivals’ –
tellingly, an unpublished PhD thesis by fellow Australian Ruth Starke
(2009: 25). The overwhelming preponderance of commentary about
writers’ festivals is journalistic or derives from cultural-sphere periodicals,
and frequently speaks of festivals disdainfully as having compromised and
commercialised literature (Ommundsen, 1999: 174). Hence the questions
posed by Kerryn Goldsworthy in her 1992 article ‘In the Flesh: Watching
Writers Read’ remain pertinent:

When . . . we pay at the door yesterday or tomorrow to hear writers

read and speak at festivals and readings, what is it exactly that we’re
happy to be paying for? Who chose the writers, and on what basis?
Where is the funding coming from? These questions should not be
read as accusatory and paranoid. . . . These questions should simply
be asked.
(46)

The recent wave of work on celebrity authorship cited in Chapter 1 of

necessity touches upon the subject of author readings and public perform-
ances. But the background of such scholars in literary studies causes their
work to fight shy of closely analysing the connections between books and
other media that writers’ festivals readily manifest, both in their pro-
gramming choices and in their audience behaviours. So to Goldsworthy’s
searching questions about the role of writers’ festivals in defining
‘Literature’ we might append the further question: what role do writers’
festivals play in blurring the boundaries between the book and other
media forms? In short, how does the writers’ festival function in the field
of the adaptation economy?
98 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
Writers’ festivals seem to be a strongly Commonwealth-derived phe-
nomenon, with the leading global events (as outlined earlier) comprising
the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Adelaide Writers’ Week, the
Sydney and Melbourne Writers’ Festivals, and Toronto’s Authors at
Harbourfront programme, in particular its International Festival of
Authors (IFOA) component (Herbert, 2001; McPhee, 2001: 237–38;
English and Frow, 2006: 43; Cameron, 2009). Beyond these headline
events stretches an array of regional, city and even suburban writers’ festi-
vals according this ‘least spectacular of all art forms with an opportunity
to strut its wares in public’ (Ommundsen, 2009: 22; McCrum, 2006).
Interestingly, long-established events such as Adelaide Writers’ Week
were originally designed as fora exclusively for published writers, with the
early years witnessing a certain hostility on the part of writers to members
of the public who wanted to attend and ask questions. The decisive shift
of writers’ festivals towards a consumption and audience focus is neatly
emblematised by the establishment in Adelaide in 1986 of a second,
smaller marquee, which hosted industry-focussed events while writers
read to public gatherings in the larger tent (Starke, 2006). There is still
invariably an industry stream of programming at writers’ festivals;
especially in countries such as Australia that no longer convene national
book fairs, much local-level rights-dealing by default takes place at the
major writers’ festivals, away from the public gaze (Ommundsen, 2009:
21). But it is, on balance, accurate to say that writers’ festival pro-
gramming over preceding decades has become overwhelmingly audience-
oriented. It aims especially to cultivate a particular demographic of
upper-middle-class, tertiary-educated attendees whose cultural consum-
ption is likely to be omnivorous, and whose networks into the media
industries tend to make them highly-courted cultural opinion-setters,
including in the realm of adaptation.
All book festivals brand themselves as celebrations of the written word,
but it is interesting to observe the politics of distinction emerging between
self-declared ‘literary’ festivals on one hand (favouring literary fiction,
poetry, essays and perhaps plays), and the more broadly conceived
‘writers’ festivals’ on the other (more open to non-fiction, genre writings,
graphic novels and digital experimentations) (Starke, 1998: xiv; Lurie,
2004: 11). It is at these more catholic-minded ‘writers’ festivals’ that
adaptation has now attained a prominent, though little analysed, profile.
Programmes of major international writers’ festivals have recently
included celebrity screenwriter adaptors, talks by authors accompanying
films adapted from their work, and panels on the joys and perils of the
adaptation process – all strongly reminiscent of sessions now regularly
featured at book fairs.30 Attempts by festivals to distinguish themselves
from rival events within the same circuit afford a fascinating glimpse of
contemporary understandings of ‘the literary’ in the process of being
actively forged, sustained and challenged. Festivals’ staged proximity of
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 99

Figure 3.5 Book festivals’ politics of distinction

Literature to other media, and the permeability of media categories this

suggests, are key ways in which contemporary notions of the ‘literary’ are
enacted. Hence the fascination of writers’ festivals lies not so much in
their self-stated claims to be ‘celebrations’ of some pre-existing category
of ‘Literature’. Rather, for all their reticence on the subject, writers’
festivals are at their most influential as subtle but effective definers of
Literature in the public mind.
The gradual shift from ‘literary’ to ‘writers’ festivals has not passed
without criticism; Australian cultural commentator Caroline Lurie laments
that:

The new type of festival visitor now expects a plentiful supply of

fairly sophisticated catering with decent wine and good coffee, for
which they are willing to pay. Inch by imperceptible inch, the demo-
graphic expands beyond passionate lovers of literature to a more
general and well cashed-up audience who wants to hear and see the
100 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
latest Booker winner, the spunky author whose sexy novel was made
into a film, the new black chick on the international circuit.
(2004: 12)31

Intriguingly, the pejorative discourse long surrounding adaptation (as

outlined in this volume’s Introduction) is here transferred from the
adapted text itself onto the cultural institutions facilitating audiences’
connection with adaptations. If studying adaptations once raised the
spectre of polluting the rarefied atmosphere of the university English
department, such commentaries suggest it now threatens to spread the
same contagion amongst the broader public.
The real, if unspoken, target of Lurie’s rather reactionary critique is
likely the morphing of the so-called ‘literary’ or ‘writers’ festival’ into a
third variant – the thoroughly cross-media cultural festival, also known
as the ‘festival of ideas’. Such events, of which the UK’s Hay Festival (held
annually in late May) is the prime example, base their programming upon
‘quality’ cultural content, regardless of its medium of origin or destination
via adaptation. They cater specifically to audiences who reject any hoary
notion of a hierarchy of media in which the book occupies the pre-emi-
nent position. Instead, such audiences actively pursue stimulating content
across formats in a medium-agnostic attitude of cultural connoisseurship.
Hence the Hay Festival’s enthusiastic embrace of former guest speaker Bill
Clinton’s adept sound-bite description of it as ‘the Woodstock of the
Mind’ (McCrum, 2006; Walker, 2008). In 2009, the Hay Festival pro-
gramme boasted, inter alia, a series of film screenings, interviews with film
directors, producers, screenwriters and stars (including director Stephen
Daldry on his three films – all themselves literary adaptations or subse-
quently adapted to the stage), graphic novelists and comic book creators,
celebrity (ex-)politicians, television personalities, playwrights, designers
and musicians.32 Hay’s conception of its audience profile is best discerned
through perusing its list of sponsors, which include the cross-media
assemblage of The Guardian, Sky Arts TV, Sony, BBC Radio and Work-
ing Title productions.33 Nor is Hay a one-off or aberrant cultural event:
its global exporting of the Hay formula saw the organisers recently given
the Queen’s Award for International Trade with closely modelled, Hay-
labelled festivals now held in Segovia, Alhambra, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi and
Beirut.34
Yet even against this background of global success for the Welsh-
borders village, tussles over who has the right to define book culture
continue. The association of Hay-on-Wye with books dates back to
Richard Booth’s opening of an eponymous bookshop in 1961 and – in a
bravura example of his talent for publicity – proclaiming himself ‘King of
Hay’ in 1977. The Hay Festival itself is a more recent development, having
been first convened in 1988 by Peter and Norman Florence with a handful
of volunteers. During the intervening years, the festival has grown to huge
 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks 101
proportions: it now attracts around 80,000 attendees annually and offers
over 350 separate events (McCrum, 2006; Middleton, 2008; Moss, 2008;
Walker, 2008; Engel, 2009). Because of its present scale, the Festival has
for some years now been staged outside of the town itself in a complex
array of tents and outdoor fora, thus reducing foot traffic through the
town’s high street. This complaint has been at the heart of some segments
of the village protesting against the festival, even in 2008 setting up a rival
(far smaller) fringe event named the ‘Real Hay Festival’ (Moss, 2008).
Recurrent amidst complaints about the celebritisation and commercial-
isation of Hay has been disquiet with the range of non-literary speakers
invited, and the list of corporate sponsors the event now attracts. Snide
references to the festival as ‘Waterstones-on-Wye’ (a reference to the UK’s
dominant bookselling chain) or ‘Sky-on-Wye’ recur in UK media coverage
of the dispute within the town (Johnson, 2009). Second-hand booksellers
in Hay interviewed in October 2009 by the UK’s Marches TV were
particularly aggrieved that Sony, to publicise its electronic Reader, was co-
sponsoring the event. Protest culminated in a made-for-publicity mock
trial and execution of Booth as ‘King of Hay’ featuring regicides complete
with pikes, axes and seventeenth-century military costume in an eccentric
but decidedly pointed street-theatre protest at the way the town was being
developed.35 Hay Festival founder and chief Peter Florence remains
unmoved by the protests, however, and disinclined to capitulate to some
townsfolk’s calls for the event to revert to being a second-hand book fair.
Without cross-media corporate sponsorship, Florence makes plain, the
Hay-style cultural festival would cease to exist: ‘We’re not trying to make
money. We’re a charity. But without sponsorship we’d have a bunch of
people in a field looking at cows’ (Engel, 2009).

Conclusion
The significance of writers’ festivals for understanding the contemporary
adaptation economy lies precisely in their range, variability and fractious-
ness. When we observe the tensions and demarcation disputes between
so-called ‘literary festivals’, ‘writers’ weeks’ and ‘festivals of ideas’, we are
observing the making of ‘the literary’ as a contemporary cultural cate-
gory. More broadly, publishers’ increasingly cognate worlds of the
book fair and the screen festival crucially stage-manage cross-industry
encounters, showcasing certain literary properties for adaptation, while
remaining less accessible to others. Rather than constituting some sacro-
sanct, pre-determined apex of print culture, the contemporary ‘literary’
world is in fact more accurately conceived of as an ongoing sociological
process, actively fashioned through the collaborations and competition
between cultural institutions in the same circuit, and now also between
events historically part of different circuits. It is crucial that adaptation
studies be attuned to these powerful sociological processes. For just as the
102 Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and Writers’ Weeks
discipline has now worked for some decades to expand the notion of
‘literary’ adaptation beyond a highly selective Anglo-American belles-
lettres canon to encompass works adapted from all print sources, we need
equally to be cognisant that such debates are not solely played out in
academic monographs, journals and conferences. The larger public
conception of what constitutes ‘Literature’ is crucially mediated in part
by audience-oriented events such as writers’ weeks. Less accessible to the
public, but by no means less determining for that, are the predominantly
industry-focussed book fairs and screen festivals which significantly filter
which properties are taken up for adaptation, and in which media, so that
they become available fodder for academic contemplation and analyses.
A piquant question for adaptation studies researchers to ask themselves
might thus be not the traditional (and otiose) one of ‘how does this screen
adaptation differ from its source text?’ but rather ‘where did this adap-
tation begin?’. Such habitual self-reflection would challenge default
recourse to methodologies of textual analysis. It should act as a spur to
researchers to factor into their theorisations the economic, institutional
and geopolitical circumstances facilitating the contemporary proliferation
of adapted texts. We are, after all, living through these changes and risk
being mere uncomprehending bystanders to them. Far preferable for
adaptations scholars to assert themselves as participants in such develop-
ments, or at the very least as informed and critical observers of them. For
this reason it is not only intellectually necessary but also an enticing
prospect to understand how such adaptation industry formations are
actively shaping individual scholarship and adaptation studies’ collective
intellectual endeavour.
4 The Novel Beyond the Book
Literary Prize-Winners on
Screen

In general, the institutionalised academic division of labour has

ensured that the discipline of sociology would tend to steer clear of
any too direct encounter with literature proper. . . . Literary values
were thus safely left to the literary critic, social facts to the sociologist.
(Milner, 2005: 54–55)

The governing impetus behind the present volume is to reconfigure the

discipline of adaptation studies by rethinking adaptation sociologically –
by asking how the traffic of content particularly between print and screen
formats is facilitated, inhibited and everywhere subtly shaped by the insti-
tutional structures of the media environment, and what the significance
of these processes might be for our understanding of adaptation. Given
this key purpose, it might appear an eccentric choice to dedicate a chapter
to the phenomenon of literary prizes. When literary prizes are discussed
by the academic community, as they rarely are other than in tones of
disparagement at their allegedly meretricious distortion of critical judge-
ment, discussion tends to be preoccupied with the textual effects of prize-
winners. Typically a self-declaredly innovative unit in a university literary
studies programme might group together a number of cumulative winners
of a particular literary award and read them together to deduce simi-
larities in theme and writerly stylistics. It is not unknown for academic
staff to set the shortlist for an annual literary award as the reading list for
a literary studies unit, with the students acting as a kind of de facto jury,
arguing the merits of the official judging panel’s decision.1 In recent years,
however, a vibrant field of research has emerged which attempts to study
the institution of literary (or more broadly cultural) prizes as a socio-
logical phenomenon, concerning itself less with textual interpretation
than with siting prizes in the context of the cultural infrastructure of a
given society. For such critics, the literary prize is deserving of attention
in its own right as a pivotal cultural function within the literary system,
influencing in crucial ways the terms on which literature is produced, cir-
culated and consumed. Yet such otherwise groundbreaking literary stud-
ies analyses tend to draw a cordon around the literary world, effectively
104 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
quarantining it from the wider media industries in a manner increasingly
difficult to reconcile with corporate publishing’s converged multinational
ownership structures and audiences’ medium-eclectic behaviours. For
literary prizes do not have a significant impact only within the biblio-
sphere, but also on the wider cultural landscape through adaptation of
literary prize-winning works for other media, notably film and television.
It is this extra-literary life of the literary prize-winner with which this
chapter is centrally concerned as it attempts to trace a perhaps counter-
intuitive concept: the life of the novel beyond the book.
Literary prizes constitute a crucial but commonly overlooked node of
the adaptation network. Chiefly, the literary prize’s role is to catalyse
adaptation, by drawing attention to a particular text (or, increasingly, to
a shortlist of highlighted texts), by broadening interest in the title beyond
the reviews pages of the literary community, typically increasing sales and
public recognition of the winning volume in the process and, through a
combination of all of these factors, markedly increasing the likelihood
of the title’s adaptation into other media formats. The previous chapter
examined the creation of a number of awards designed specifically to
facilitate adaptation of certain properties, particularly the various prizes
instituted by adaptation rights marketplaces such as the Cinema and
Literature International Forum (CLIF) in Monaco and the annual
Frankfurt Book Fair. Better known and often longer-established than
these awards however is a range of literary prizes in English-speaking
countries whose effect on the adaptation industry may be more powerful
precisely because they are awarded at arm’s length from adaptation
rights-trading fora themselves. Globally, the pre-eminent literary acco-
lade, both in terms of prize money and prestige, is the Nobel Prize in
Literature, awarded annually (and often controversially) by the Swedish
Academy for an international author’s body of work. Within the US,
leading literary awards for a single book include the Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction, the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle
Award and honourable mentions such as the ‘New York Times Notable
Book’ badge. Within the UK and British Commonwealth, the leader of
the prize field is undoubtedly the Man Booker Prize (known prior to a
change of sponsors in 2002 as the Booker Prize), which in 2008 cele-
brated its fortieth anniversary with much self-congratulatory fanfare.2
The Booker is flanked in the UK by the more recently established women-
only Orange Prize for Fiction, the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book
Awards, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, and a number of less pub-
licly well-known but critically esteemed prizes such as the long-running
James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Guardian First Book Award
(previously the Guardian Fiction Award). In addition to their citizens
being eligible for some of these UK-based prizes, many Anglophone
Commonwealth countries have their own literary awards, such as
Australia’s oldest and pre-eminent prize for fiction, the Miles Franklin
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 105
Award, the newly established Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and the
various state premiers’ literary awards, all bestowed annually. Similarly,
Canada offers the Governor General’s Literary Award, open to Canadian
citizens only, and Ireland the extremely lucrative and internationally
minded IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, awarded to writers of any
nationality working in any language. For the contemporary Anglophone
author, the literary sphere is flush with award opportunities and their
associated potential for additional income, career enhancement and
showcasing of a book property to ancillary media industries.
The current chapter selects for detailed case study the Man Booker
Prize, awarded annually to a novel written in English by a citizen of the
British Commonwealth (or South Africa or the Republic of Ireland,
which, at various points, have resigned or remained aloof from the
nostalgically imperial but functionally ill-defined organisation that is the
Commonwealth). My choice is prompted partly by the profile of the
Booker itself (including more recently in the US whose authors are not
eligible for the award),3 its reliable facility in generating high-profile
scandals, its track record of selecting winners who subsequently attain
major literary status, and the high incidence of Booker-shortlisted titles
adapted for the screen – occasionally to great cinematic acclaim.
Particularly fascinating is that the management of the Man Booker Prize
has recently – and rather belatedly – recognised the prize’s perhaps
serendipitous reputation as an incubator of adaptation projects, going so
far as to embrace this fact as evidence of the prize’s talent-spotting
acumen and cultural centrality. This lends recent Booker pronouncements
a self-consciousness regarding the prize’s relationship to the broader
adaptation economy that is reminiscent of awards such as those given by
the CLIF or the Frankfurt Book Fair. But the Booker and its growing flock
of ‘Booker films’ attract greater public respect because facilitating adap-
tation was not the Booker’s original raison d’être and such films can thus
be construed as cross-media endorsements of the Booker’s astute literary
selections rather than as evidence of self-justifying event boosterism.
All self-described ‘literary’ awards are given ostensibly for critically-
determined excellence in textual composition, as opposed to the various
‘book awards’, commonly chosen by the industry itself, which recognise
success in book design, marketing, publicity or contribution to retail turn-
over. But the sharp distinction that judges of literary awards have been
keen to perpetuate between awards for a title’s artistic excellence and
those recognising its commercial profile belies the extent to which even
self-described literary awards have for several decades had a significant
impact in the marketplace: prompting new cover designs and re-jacketing
of a winning author’s backlist; reorienting bookshop layout by guaran-
teeing preferential display of winning titles; and also influencing readers’
reception of a work through mentions of a title’s prize-winning status
in book reviews and the broader literary sphere. Hence even avowedly
106 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
‘literary’ awards have long had important sociological effects which crit-
ics in recent years have begun to tease out. What remains opaque,
however, is the sociological knock-on effect of literary prizes on a title’s
chances of being adapted to other media, and the various motivations and
strategies invoked by adapters to flag their property’s literary prize-
winning pedigree to screen audiences (an issue also explored in Chapter
6). Hence the current chapter includes, in spite of the book’s Introduction
abjuring such a methodology, some brief textual analyses of Booker film
adaptations, not as cinematic close-reading for its own sake, but to
investigate what these screen texts reveal about the adaptation industry
from which they emerge.

Conceptualising Literary Prizes: Theoretical Approaches

Literary prizes are a characteristically twentieth-century phenomenon,
flourishing particularly in the last decades of the century (English, 2002:
126; Street, 2005: 822; Driscoll, 2008). Yet academic analysis of literary
prizes in Anglophone countries has failed to keep pace with their
proliferation, their burgeoning industrial sway, and concomitantly high
levels of public recognition. The academy’s habitual responses to literary
prizes might be grouped into four strategies. The first of these, and
perhaps the most powerful because of its very covertness, has been simply
to ignore literary awards as mere lotteries which at best signify contem-
porary judges’ esteem for newly published works but which indicate
nothing of a text’s longevity, canonical worthiness or ‘intrinsic’ artistic
value. When the discrepancy between such intellectual marginalising of
prize culture and the fulsome journalistic coverage the phenomenon
regularly receives became too great, the dominant critical mode for
addressing prize culture shifted to one of outright disparagement. Prize
culture was attacked for its commercialising, celebritising logic and its
imposition of an allegedly inappropriate hyper-individualistic and com-
petitive ethos on the process of artistic creation (‘Who’, 1989). By such
reasoning the proliferation of prizes was itself a sign of their ultimate
inconsequence, signifying a sectoral devaluation that promised the immi-
nent collapse of the entire prize system under the weight of its own puffery
(Hitchens, 1993: 16, 19). Former UK publisher and literary editor Robert
McCrum provides a splendidly splenetic synthesis of such disparaging
responses to prize culture in his comments about the emergence of a new
prize-ordained literary genre: ‘Out of a swamp of greed, ambition and
creative writing crawled a new Gollum, the “Booker novel”, trailing the
slime of self-promotion’ (2006).
The very excess of McCrum’s rhetoric perhaps indicates that the tactic
of dismissing prize culture through vituperative disparagement was
beginning to exhaust itself – paradoxically drawing attention to exactly
that which it wished to relegate to the cultural margins. By the mid 1990s
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 107
a new strand of academic responses to literary prizes attempted to take
seriously prizes’ new-found cultural centrality and to use various awards
as pointers to ‘serious’ new literary fiction worthy of detailed textual
analysis. So Richard Todd’s Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and
Fiction in Britain Today (1996) promotes itself in its back-cover blurb as
‘the first full study of the Booker-led explosion of literary fiction in the
last fifteen years’, devoting its first third to discussion of the Booker’s
establishment, rules and history of various scandals, and its later two-
thirds to thematically linked textual analyses of various Booker-winning
or -shortlisted titles. In Todd’s phrasing the book’s rationale is to ‘both
offer direction through the dense thicket of the fiction itself, and illumi-
nate the various preoccupations of that fiction’ (1996: 1). While Todd’s
book deserves praise for breaking new academic ground in rejecting the
disparaging approach to prize culture in favour of positing the literary
prize (albeit implicitly rather than explicitly) as a subject worthy of full-
length academic attention, the book is in other ways markedly metho-
dologically conservative. The volume’s first third analyses the cultural
context of the Booker largely through quantitative information about the
UK book trade (posited unproblematically as the normative locus for
reception of ‘post-colonial’ fiction), while the book’s remaining portion
invokes fairly standard literary-critical close-reading techniques to elu-
cidate the significance of Todd’s predominantly post-colonial and post-
modern Booker choices. The reader is left to ponder why the intriguing
cultural and commercial phenomenon of the Booker Prize is not itself
being theorised.
It is exciting in this context to note the efflorescence, from around
the mid- 1990s but especially since the turn of the millennium, of a cluster
of academic studies which proceed to do just this: to situate the literary
prize in its social context and to tease out theoretically its workings
(Moran, 2000; Squires, 2004; 2007). Reaching beyond the narrowly
interpretive methodological toolkit of literary studies, such works almost
all borrow from the research techniques and theoretical schemas of the
social sciences, specifically French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s
theory of the cultural ‘field’ as articulated in The Field of Cultural
Production (1993) and The Rules of Art (1996 ([1992]) – a materialist
orientation to cultural analysis which they share with the present study
(Huggan, 1997: 413; English, 2002: 110; 2005: 8; Squires, 2004: 41;
Street, 2005: 821; Norris, 2006: 139; York, 2007: 28). Prominent post-
colonial literary critic Graham Huggan as early as 1994 observed that the
Booker Prize’s over-easy conflation with a growing body of post-colonial
fiction (especially after Salman Rushdie’s watershed Booker win in 1981
for Midnight’s Children) served to mask the lingeringly imperial and
highly-concentrated structures of Anglophone book publishing, centred
either in the former colonial metropole of London or its neo-colonial
challenger New York City (24). While the Booker’s juries clearly
108 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
recognise that top-quality literary fiction may emerge from the countries
of the former colonial ‘periphery’, London’s literary establishment –
sitting in medieval splendour at the Booker Prize dinner’s favoured venue
of the Guildhall4 – reserves to itself the right to consecrate literary
excellence in ‘Commonwealth’ writing. ‘Crucially,’ Huggan notes, ‘the
seat of judgement remains British’ (1997: 418). Prize-winning Australian
author (though not Booker winner) Robert Drewe wryly corroborates
Huggan’s view of a paternalistic and patronising exoticism of the colonial
margins by a book trade infrastructure that remains obdurately rooted
within the imperial centre:

Of course, prizes are nice for the winner, but you have to realise
they’re a lottery. As for their importance, frankly it only really counts
in terms of sales and reputation if you win an overseas one. The old
cultural cringe still thrives in the media and in AustLit. Critics and
journalists put immense stock in London or New York opinion.
(Phelan, 2005: 85)

Huggan’s breakthrough is to insist that post-colonial literary criticism

cease blithely celebrating the success of the empire in ‘writing back’ to the
former imperial power and instead raise its myopic gaze from the words
on the page to consider the institutional and commercial context of their
favoured novels’ production: ‘What emerges from these scattered specu-
lations on . . . the Booker is the need for a much more detailed sociological
study of the literature it promotes’ (1997: 426). Unfortunately, for
Huggan the riptide of textual analysis proves too strong, and in the same
article in which he makes this perceptive observation he devotes a lengthy
section to analysing the treatment of the theme of history in various
Booker-nominated texts – a ratio of analytical methodologies strongly
reminiscent of Todd’s book.5
In his 1999 review of Todd’s Consuming Fictions, US literary academic
James F. English had lamented this slippage back into the familiar rubrics
of textual analysis in treatment of the literary prize and called for a full-
length study of the sociology of the prize system in its own right. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, English proceeded to answer his own call in a series of
publications culminating in his (itself prize-winning) monograph The
Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural
Value (2005). English’s triumph in this landmark volume is, by invoking
a loosely though not uncritically Bourdieusian framework, to provide for
the first time a thoroughly theorised model of the prize phenomenon as a
device for the intraconversion of symbolic and economic capital. For the
contemporary cultural prize (including literary prizes such as the Booker)
controversy is inevitable because the prize mechanism itself exists to
transact exchanges between the two fundamentally incompatible concep-
tual systems of culture and commerce: ‘Far from posing a threat to the
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 109
prize’s efficacy as an instrument of the cultural economy, scandal is its
lifeblood; far from constituting a critique, indignant commentary about
the prize is an index of its normal and proper functioning’ (2005: 208).
Thus, analysing the phenomenon of the cultural prize provides critics with
a means for understanding the complex interrelationship of artistic and
economic forces at every point in the spheres of cultural production and
reception. In a theoretical manoeuvre paralleling the present volume’s
challenge to the discipline of adaptation studies, English argues com-
pellingly for literary studies to wean itself from its narrowly (if baroquely
theorised) habits of literary close-reading to ask how the structures of the
literary prize system might themselves influence in crucial ways aca-
demics’ selection and readings of texts.
With respect for English’s critical acumen and the wide range of
cultural spheres he analyses (his volume ranges far beyond the literary
academic’s comfort zone of book prizes to encompass film, television,
music, visual arts, performance and architectural awards also), The
Economy of Prestige fails to account for the interrelationships between
these various creative fields. For English, the cultural capital associated
with the literary prize represents good coin solely within the literary
realm; his analysis is sectoral-specific rather than cross-sectoral in its
failure to account for how award of symbolic capital in one media field
has important flow-on effects for a property’s value in other media
spheres. It is on this point that the current chapter builds upon but also
departs from English’s analysis of the literary prize. I explore how literary
awards do not merely legitimate symbolic capital in a particular cultural
segment, but moreover actively facilitate the conversion of that capital
into other media sectors, with potentially beneficial effects for the orig-
inating cultural industry. To this end, the remainder of the current chapter
investigates how winning or even shortlisting for a major literary award
such as the Booker Prize catalyses a particular content package’s adap-
tability and repurposable potential in multiple media, with what effects
for those involved, and with which specific ramifications for the book
industry as a whole.

‘It Just Shows What the Booker Can Do’:6 Prize Culture,
Book Sales and the Rights Economy
It is a truism of journalistic and academic commentary on book prizes
that the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction has a seismic impact on
book sales in the UK and Commonwealth – most spectacularly on retail-
ers’ turnover of the winning title, but also of the other five titles on the
shortlist.7 Announcement of the winner of the annual Man Booker Prize
is built up to in a strategically managed teaser campaign which since 2001
has comprised an initial ‘longlist’ of eight titles,8 subsequently whittled
down by the judging panel to produce a shortlist, before the live televised
110 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
announcement of the prize’s now single annual winner (Huggan, 1997:
415, 424–25; Anderson, 1998: 26–27; Holman, 2003: 10–11; Norris,
2006: 139–40; Keneally, 2007: 166).9 Booker laureation’s booster effect
on sales can by now be taken as a given; my concern here is, rather: what
is the effect of Booker shortlisting on a title’s chances of subsequent screen
adaptation? Let us take a generous estimate that perhaps 10 per cent of
all published novels – whether literary or popular fiction – are optioned
by screen producers. We can then further narrow the field with industry
statistics that between 10 per cent (at the generous end of the scale) and
1 per cent (at the pessimistic end) of these options agreements actually
result in further contracts being signed for sale of screen rights. The funnel
is narrowed still further by considering only those rights sales leading to
actually released films or broadcast television productions (Banki, 1982:
1–2; Bedford, 1985: 5–6; Seger, 1992: xii; Wyndham, 2005b: 5; Raftos,
2008). Publishers Weekly in a 1979 survey of book/screen-industry liai-
sons adopted a note of caution in surveying the plethora of recent New
York-Hollywood rights sales:

Still, the chances of seeing a book actually made into a movie are very
slim. . . . Even for top-selling books that pull sizable rights sales on
movie deals, most agents believe the odds against those books actu-
ally becoming films are conservatively 10–1.
(Holt, 1979: 138)

The outcome of this increasingly selective process is that only a tiny

number of novels published each year – on the basis of the above rule of
thumb perhaps as little as 0.1 per cent – will generate completed screen
adaptations.10 In stark contrast, surveying Booker Prize-shortlisted titles
between 1969 (the year the prize was first awarded) and 2009 (the most
recent year for which the shortlist was available at the time of writing)
reveals that an astounding 21 per cent of shortlisted novels have resulted
in produced films or television adaptations. If we additionally factor in
projects that are currently in production, or have been announced in the
trade press as in development, the figure rises to 23 per cent.11
These calculations are broadly in line with the Booker Prize admini-
strators’ own recent estimates. The Booker Prize’s London-based public
relations agency Colman Getty distributes a list of Booker-winning and
-shortlisted titles that have been made into films, and of screen
adaptations of other titles by Booker-winning authors.12 Ion Trewin,
Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes, states:

More than a quarter of all Booker prize-winners have been turned

into films, and some great ones, The English Patient and Schindler’s
Ark [sic] – both Academy Award winners – among them. And
another 25 shortlisted novels have been filmed too. Atonement, Notes
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 111
on a Scandal and Empire of the Sun stand out in my mind. The prize
has acted as an invaluable catalyst for some of the most imaginative
film-making of the past four decades.13

The promotional fillip of shortlisting indisputably increases the value

and likely sale of screen rights; as Richard Todd observes, ‘each year’s
“winners” are not just the novelists and their books: the winners include
publishers and agents who are positioned to negotiate foreign and film
rights’ (1996: 81). Thomas Keneally’s memoir Searching for Schindler
(2007) records the author being approached within days of his 1982
Booker win for Schindler’s Ark by two separate film production com-
panies, UK-based Goldcrest (producers of the then-recent epic Gandhi,
much admired by Keneally) and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment,
backed by the financial and distribution heft of Universal. In the event,
Amblin overcame Keneally’s scepticism of both the flimflammery of the
option process and of Hollywood’s ability to portray three-dimensional
Nazis; Spielberg dispensed with the usual option agreement and pro-
ceeded straight to purchase of the film rights (173; 181–82; Trewin,
2008). Keneally discreetly sidesteps the question of the purchase price but
allows ‘I was on my way to what every writer sometimes secretly dreams
of: payday’ and that ‘it seemed I would be freed from want for some years’
(2007: 182, 184).
Interestingly, there are recent signs that the Booker’s brand value has
risen further in the US market since Canadian author Yann Martel’s 2002
breakout success with Life of Pi (currently in feature film production).14
US-based book industry commentators observe that ‘the Man Booker
itself is morphing into something bigger over here. Thanks to last year’s
winner, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, it seems to have become less foreign and
more influential’ (Feldman, 2003: 10). This reading appears borne out by
the increased flagging of Booker prestige in cover stickers for US editions
of shortlisted titles; for example, the US Riverhead Books edition cover
design for Sarah Waters’ 2002 shortlisted title Fingersmith still sub-
ordinates Booker laureation to ‘A New York Times Notable Book’, but
its appearance on the front cover at all testifies to the penetration of the
Booker brand within the US domestic market by this date (Waters, 2002).
In more recent years Grove Press (the US division of multinational
independent Grove Atlantic) found that adding ‘Winner of the Man
Booker Prize’ strap-lines to its front cover designs for Kiran Desai’s The
Inheritance of Loss (2006) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007)
piggybacked on existing publicity to increase sales massively (Trewin,
2008). Trewin cites a survey of public awareness of various book prizes
undertaken for the US’s National Book Award (NBA) which did not
specifically include the Booker amongst the various options survey parti-
cipants could check, but which many participants proactively wrote into
the survey in spaces allocated for comments. Trewin recalls his NBA
112 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen

Figure 4.1 The Man Booker Prize’s growing US brand profile, as revealed by
Grove Atlantic’s US paperback front cover design for Anne Enright’s
The Gathering (2007)
Cover image from The Gathering, copyright © 2007 by Anne Enright. Cover design by
Gretchen Mergenthaler. Cover photograph by Alan Powdrill/Getty Images. Used by
permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 113
contact (and presumed book-prize rival) conceding on the basis of the sur-
vey findings that Booker has ‘a powerful brand’ (Trewin, 2008). The close
proximity of the world’s dominant audio-visual industry in Hollywood
suggests that the value of screen rights in Booker-shortlisted novels will
only continue to appreciate.

‘The Dangerous, Glamorous Interface between the Two

Sets of Values’:15 The Booker Prize Goes to the Movies
In launching its fortieth anniversary celebrations in 2008, the manage-
ment of the Man Booker Prize announced ‘The Booker Prize at the
Movies’ – a programme of four paired film screenings and writer talks
convened weekly throughout June 2008 at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts in London (Merritt, 2008: 3).16 The announcement of the pro-
gramme specifically cites three kinds of evidence of the Booker’s success
over the preceding four decades: book sales; new kinds of writing dis-
covered; and films the prize has generated.17 This third rationale under-
lines just how tightly interlinked contemporary book cultures and the
broader mediasphere have become, and the level of public awareness of
this fact. Interestingly, this justification of a literary prize on the grounds
of its links with film culture received no equivalent mention in Booker’s
1998 self-published volume celebrating the prize’s thirtieth anniversary
(Booker, 1998). In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of the ‘Booker
Prize at the Movies’ series of events is that it highlights just how long the
Booker Prize has been acting as a catalyst for screen adaptation, yet how
belatedly the prize’s management seems to have realised this fact and
contrived ways to capitalise upon it.
The disjunction between the general public’s, creative industries’ and
even Booker judges’ perception of the prize’s important role in the
adaptation economy on one hand and the seeming obliviousness towards
this fact on the part of the prize’s administrators on the other goes back
almost to the origins of the award. Reading through the Booker Prize
archive, permanently housed since 2003 at Oxford Brookes University in
the UK, it is clear that during the first years of the prize in the early 1970s
its Booker-appointed managers were preoccupied with securing news-
paper, radio and television publicity first and foremost.18 It is only with
judging Chair Angus Wilson’s otherwise rather reactionary speech at the
Booker dinner in 1975, in which he comments favourably on the quasi-
cinematic cross-cutting narrative techniques evident in that year’s winning
title, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, that media beyond the book
begin slowly to register in the archive as creative ventures in their own
right.19 Jhabvala herself wrote the screenplay for James Ivory’s 1983 film
adaptation of Heat and Dust – the first Booker winner adapted for the
screen – and later established herself as one of literary cinema’s most
prolific and respected adapters, particularly for her subsequent adaptations
114 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
of classic works for Merchant Ivory Productions (see Chapter 5). In the
years subsequent to Jhabvala’s win, Management Committee and press
release documents note in passing such cross-media traffic as Fred
Schepisi’s acclaimed film adaptation of shortlisted author Thomas
Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972), that a film of Margaret
Atwood’s shortlisted novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) was about to go
into production, and winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s previous work as a
screenwriter.20 But it took another judging Chair’s speech, this time by Fay
Weldon at the 1983 Booker award dinner, to point out that the then
imminent merger of the UK’s Writers’ Guild, the Society of Authors and
the Theatre Writers’ Guild demonstrated concretely how transmedial
contemporary writers’ careers had become (a point which Weldon, as a
novelist, screenwriter and former advertising copywriter, could speak on
with some authority): ‘for these days a writer increasingly is a writer, is a
writer, is a writer – and can move easily amongst the various media’.21
Perhaps the Management Committee’s lingering skittishness regarding
repurposing of Booker titles in other media stems from its disquiet at the
dramatised extracts from shortlisted titles which were packaged into
BBC2’s live broadcast coverage of this same 1983 Booker dinner. The
Committee’s post-mortem of the year’s broadcast reveals much managerial
headshaking over the readings’ apparent televisual clunkiness:

I don’t think the two media mix, without the intervention of trained
adapters, screenwriters etc. In TV terms they lacked any unity. . . .
The whole effect was cheapening and a concession to “showbiz”; it
detracted from the Prize’s concern with literary merit.22

In 1990 the Management Committee departed from form in appointing

as judging Chair Sir Denis Forman, Deputy Chairman of the UK’s
Granada Television, which at that time was still enjoying the critical
afterglow of its lavish 14-part miniseries derived from Booker-winner
Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, adapted under the title The Jewel in the Crown
(1984) (the name of the first volume in Scott’s series).23 Forman’s speech
unsurprisingly dwells on his core area of expertise in screen media, high-
lighting the distinctive narrative qualities of print and television, and
evincing a rather reverent attitude towards ‘literature’ as compared with
the industrial compromises inevitable in television production (a binary
strongly reminiscent of adaptation studies’ founding theorist George
Bluestone, as outlined in the Introduction to this volume). Forman posits
adaptation in its familiar guise as a secondary form of accomplishment,
wherein the craftsman’s faithful respect for the source text rather than
original creative genius is key:

the vision of the writer passed through the people making the
programme and reached the screen through them, as if they were his
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 115
apprentices or perhaps colleagues, much in the same way that great
painters used to collect around them a school of lesser artists whose
work closely reflected that of the master.24

Granted Forman, as an upstart interloper from the field of screen media

claiming ‘little knowledge of the publishing trade’, might have been
playing up to his literary audience, underlining literature’s presumed
greater cultural authority and quarantining from commercial concerns in
a pre-emptively placatory gesture; Forman opens his speech with a self-
deprecating description of himself as ‘not a connoisseur of the novel but
a workmanlike television chap with an appetite for a good story and a
profound reverence for the English language’. Indeed Forman goes so far
in this vein to posit the novel as an ‘unfettered’ format compared with ‘the
greedy maw of broadcasting’ – literature rises above its competitor media
as ‘one of the last strongholds of free writing’, requiring no ‘team work,
no editorial committee, no third party of any kind’. This is an astonishing
claim to make to a room full of publishers, editors, agents, publicists and
critics, not to mention to the assembled prize administrators themselves,
whose very jobs exist to mediate public perceptions of and access to
fiction. Viewed in retrospect, at is as though, by the beginning of the
1990s, the administrators of the Booker Prize had not yet found a way
comfortably to celebrate the facilitating and accelerating role played by
the Booker in the broader media economy. Unsurprisingly given this
dichotomy, public hunger to engage with Booker novels beyond the book
found outlet at some remove from the auspices of the Booker Prize itself
– in periodic on-air readings of shortlisted titles, especially by BBC Radio
4’s Book at Bedtime programme,25 and one-off live events assembling
several Booker-shortlisted authors in a London theatre for readings and
audience question-and-answer opportunities.26
In 1995, with the involvement of long-time Booker Management
Committee Chair Michael Caine drawing to a close, the Committee com-
missioned the discussion paper ‘The Booker Prize for Fiction: 1995 and
the Future’, investigating various strategies for ensuring the longevity and
continued public profile of the award in an increasingly crowded prize
field. Compared with 2008’s ‘Booker Prize at the Movies’ campaign, most
striking about the 1995 discussion paper is its absence of ideas as to how
the Booker managers might capitalise on the screen industries’ demon-
strated interest in adapting Booker shortlisted titles for the screen, and the
public enthusiasm for such adaptations – not instead of but in addition to
the source novels – whether these were encountered prior or subsequent
to consumption of the screen version. The reasons for this curious
disconnect between the Booker’s by then well-established adaptation
catalyser role and the Management Committee’s silence on the point can
probably be traced back to the Booker Corporation’s original motiva-
tions in sponsoring the prize in the late 1960s. Booker McConnell, an
116 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
agribusiness and food processing group with large holdings in the former
British colonies of the Caribbean had, for tax-minimisation purposes,
established a subsidiary division, Bookers Books. This entity purchased
majority shares in the copyright-controlling companies established by the
estates of lucrative popular fiction writers such as Ian Fleming and Agatha
Christie.27 Booker’s then management conceived of the endowment of a
literary award with the ‘main objective of enabling Booker McConnell to
become persona grata in the literary field’.28 Not only would such a prize
carry a serendipitous echo of the company name, but it would addi-
tionally serve as a public demonstration of Booker ‘giving back’ to the
publishing community from the profits derived from these deceased
popular writers’ estates. Yet, because Booker sought beneficial corporate
association with the realm of prestige cultural production, the Booker
Prize was conceived from its inception as a distinctly ‘high-art’ award for
literary fiction only. Spy thrillers and crime fiction may have constituted
important entries on Booker’s corporate balance sheet, but only literary
fiction would accumulate sufficient cultural capital to justify outlay of
shareholder monies.
This original prize rationale had the perhaps unintended effect of wed-
ding the usually business-trained Booker managers charged with admin-
istering the prize to a certain ideological paradigm and literary rhetoric
grounded upon hard and fast distinctions between ‘great’ writing and
manifest trash.29 Ironically, it did so in precisely those decades during
which such Leavisite distinctions were coming under sustained attack and
falling into discredit within the literary academy. Thus Booker managed
spectacularly to catch the wave of one 1970–80s literary critical fashion
in the form of post-colonialism – to the extent that from Midnight’s
Children onwards Booker winners constituted almost a de facto reading
list in contemporary post-colonial literature. But it simultaneously
painted itself into a corner in relation to British cultural studies-inspired
debates about the social production of cultural value because of its
adamantine insistence that great literature was innately superior not only
to popular fiction but to popular culture as a whole. One of the 1975
judging panel, Roy Fuller, fulminated in the Guardian newspaper against
what has become known colloquially as the ‘Hampstead novel’, a British
narrative typically limiting its horizons to the mid-life dilemmas and
middle-class adulteries of people stultifyingly similar to those forming the
social environment inhabited by their creators: ‘Novelists have to get
away from writing the diary which they are doing at the moment: that is
too easy. There is a public for it; but it is a television drama public, and
it is there on TV’. Bringing the article to the attention of the Management
Committee, Booker Management Committee Chair Michael Caine
regarded Fuller’s jeremiad as ‘extremely perceptive’.30 Given such a start-
ing position, it became almost impossible for the Booker Prize’s manage-
ment to lend enthusiastic public support to Booker titles successfully
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 117
adapted to the screen. After all, it was the market failure of ‘the English
novel’ and alleged creeping philistinism of late-1960s Britain that had
prompted Booker McConnell’s subsidy of an annual book prize in the
first place; if the market could itself be trusted to adjudge the value of
Booker choices through rights-trading and cross-media production
perhaps there was no need for Booker’s corporate largesse in the first
place?
The recently installed Literary Director of the Man Booker Prize, Ion
Trewin – himself a former Times literary editor, publisher at Hodder &
Stoughton, and Booker judge – deserves credit for charting the Prize’s way
out of this self-defeating ‘culture versus trash’ binary logic. Trewin’s 2008
championing of ‘The Booker Prize at the Movies’, viewed in this light, is
not only an adept means to enhance public awareness of the prize’s
fortieth anniversary, but more fundamentally represents a harnessing of
the Booker’s cross-media commercial impact as evidence of its cultural
clout. Trewin recounts:

This [2008] being the fortieth anniversary of the prize, we looked

around for the kinds of things we could do that might celebrate forty
years of the prize. And somebody . . . pointed out that the number of
both prize-winners and shortlisted books that had either been turned
into film or had been acquired for film but hadn’t been made was
actually substantial. And wouldn’t it be a great idea to have a season
somewhere . . .
(Trewin, 2008)

In this new formulation of the prize’s role, cultural esteem and com-
mercial heft are presented as mutually enhancing. The Booker functions
as a sifting device bringing contemporary fiction of the highest calibre to
the attention of a broad English-language reading public; should film
producers then take up this content to adapt for acclaimed films that only
serves to bring the title, novelist and prize to a still wider audience,
validating in turn the Booker’s role as sagacious judge of cultural value in
the first instance. For cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, by contrast, the
field of restricted production akin to high culture and the sphere of
commercial mass production typical of the capitalist system are forever
locked in conflict: ‘It is always an opposition between small-scale and
large-scale (“commercial”) production . . . between the deferred, lasting
success of “classics” and the immediate, temporary success of bestsellers’
(1993: 82; see also 113). Elevation of a cultural property’s stocks in the
economic sphere serves, in Bourdieu’s conception, to reduce its symbolic
capital in inverse proportion. The administrators of the contemporary
Booker Prize evidently suffer from no such neo-Marxist qualms. But, as
the following selected case studies of Booker-shortlisted titles adapted
for the screen aim to highlight, neither of these rather reductionist
118 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
frameworks adequately captures the complexity of capital flows with
which the Booker film is typically charged.

‘The Bookish Temperament has Rarely Seemed So

Sexy’:31 Booker-shortlisted Novels on Screen
The already fraught commercial/cultural dual identity inherent in the
Booker Prize’s set-up is further exacerbated in the case of Booker screen
adaptations, for the adapted text must moreover straddle the distinctive
media of print and the screen. On one hand, the established brand identity
of Booker-shortlisted titles makes them compelling source material for
film-makers. The fact that a Booker-shortlisted title already enjoys a level
of public recognition gives it a certain pre-sold quality, demonstrating
‘a built-in audience’32 of potential film-going readers which serves to
reduce commercial risk and thus facilitates production financing (see
Chapter 6 for elaboration of this issue) (Kemp and Bulkley, 2004: 4;
Higson, 2006: 71). It is no accident that Working Title, the UK produc-
tion house responsible for many notable literary adaptations including
Atonement (2007), has around 30 per cent of its development slate
deriving from book options at any one time (Kemp and Bulkley, 2004: 4).
Yet, on the other hand, the peculiarly literary qualities that the Booker
shortlist typically celebrates – strongly interiorised point-of view, lin-
guistic self-consciousness, playful metafictionality – tend to make these
amongst the most difficult texts to translate to audio-visual media. British
television comedian, and 2002 Booker Prize judge, David Baddiel is one
of many to have taken the Booker to task for the over-representation of
such novels, deemed by Booker’s detractors to evince its judges’ penchant
for postmodern obscurantism. Baddiel’s tongue-in-cheek advice for the
would-be Booker-winning novelist is: ‘Make your narrator an artist, a
writer or an academic who can spend a lot of time thinking very deep
thoughts about art, writing or academia’ (2002). Hence Booker adapters
both desire to convert such properties’ literary acclaim into filmic prestige,
but often seek to do so against the thematic grain of the novels themselves.
Out of their struggle to achieve such a complex alchemy, film-makers
have devised a number of onscreen strategies to flag Booker consecration
and directorial reverence for print culture, while aiming to create a filmic
text both commercially successful as well as critically esteemed by the
cinematic community. As this summary might suggest, to carry off such
a thing is no easy task. Hence the contradictory and perceptibly anxious
nature of many Booker films as they attempt to broker the interests of
multiple adaptation industry stakeholders.
Borrowing from the useful terminological taxonomies of narratology,
we can classify these various directorial strategies for referencing print
culture into extradiegetic and intradiegetic varieties. Among film industry
tactics for associating the cultural cachet of a celebrated author with
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 119
a screen adaptation of their work is hiring the author as an executive
producer, a ploy which can in production terms ensure a useful source of
on-hand knowledge about the narrative world conveyed in the book.
Simultaneously, in terms of marketing and promotion, it serves to
forestall aggrieved fans’ predictable complaints that their favourite
author’s work has been debased by ham-fisted, faithless adaptation (see
also Chapters 1 and 6 on this point). Thus the production notes for
Atonement record that acclaimed British author Ian McEwan served as
an executive producer on the project, a position which frees the novelist
from the burden of overseeing the financial and daily shooting minutiae
of a line or assistant producer, but which confers significant say in the
choice of screenwriter, cast and possibly even director (Donadio, 2007;
Hampton, 2007: v).33 Authors have also long worked as screenwriters on
adaptations of their novels: Booker shortlistees Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,
Roddy Doyle, Anita Desai, Patrick McCabe and David Lodge all wrote
film or television screenplays of their own works. Yet it is a decades-old
cliché in film circles that the unfamiliarly collaborative nature of the
screenwriter role can chafe against the novelist’s habitual (albeit relative)
autonomy: Thomas Keneally recalls being ‘sacked’ – ‘in the nicest possible
way’ – by Spielberg after delivering a first, overly long draft screenplay for
Schindler’s List (2007: 193). At one remove from commissioning the
author to draft an adapted screenplay is the practice of soliciting authorial
commentary on screenplay drafts composed by others. Iconoclastic US
director Neil LaBute has claimed that receiving A.S. Byatt’s imprimatur
for his radical changes to the modern male protagonist of her Booker-
winning novel Possession (1990; 2002) was like being offered ‘the keys
to the kingdom’: ‘Not only did Byatt O.K. the change [of nebbish British
postdoctoral student Roland into a handsome, brash US expatriate]; she
didn’t question the humor either. She got it. Humor makes us alive, and
she wanted Roland to be alive on the screen’ (Zalewski, 2002a: 10).
Securing Byatt’s blessing for what had been a troubled project long in
Hollywood development turn-around enabled LaBute to transform one
of the Booker’s most self-consciously literary winners into a more
straightforwardly cinematic tale of transatlantic culture clash. In espe-
cially close author–director collaborations, novelists have engaged in
avid publicity for a film adaptation, to an extent that goes well beyond
the token red-carpet premiere appearance alluded to at the opening of
Chapter 1. In the wake of The English Patient’s (1996) Academy Award
success, novelist Michael Ondaatje and director Anthony Minghella even
staged joint readings at New York Town Hall and in Ondaatje’s home
town of Toronto, taking turns to read corresponding sections of the novel
and the screenplay in a performative embodiment of the filmic text’s
interrelationship with its print source (Minghella, 1997: 3; Stoffman,
1997: E5). With Ondaatje having served as a consultant on the film, col-
laborator on the screenplay, visitor to the set and adviser during the
120 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
editing process, this intense author–director partnership proved, in the
late Minghella’s words, a ‘blessed collaboration’ (Jaggi, 1997: 9; Gerstel,
1996b).
Situated at the liminal zone between the extra- and intradiegetic spheres
is the familiar opening-credit-sequence title stating that an adaptation is
‘based on the novel by . . .’, ‘from the bestselling book by . . .’, or ‘from
the pen of . . .’. Adaptation studies has a longstanding interest in such
onscreen markers of adapter self-consciousness which function as though
to suture together audience familiarity (whether first-hand or not) with
the source text and the work they are about to see (Stam and Raengo,
2005: 19). At times, such appeals to pre-existing audience knowledge are
less attempts to claim cultural status in the eyes of arthouse audiences
conceived broadly so much as sly winks to niche fan communities, such
as the knowing in-joke in Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy
(1992; 1997) when Irish author Patrick McCabe makes a cameo
appearance as the dishevelled town drunk, Jimmy the Skite. (Much to his
credit, McCabe deflected the gesture’s neo-Hitchcockian pretensions with
the self-deprecating parry: ‘That wasn’t acting . . . It was just being drunk’
(Lacey, 1998: 50).) In these and other instances outlined in Chapter 1’s
survey of the contemporary author function, the novelist’s onscreen

Figure 4.2 Author Patrick McCabe’s cameo as town drunk Jimmy the Skite in
Neil Jordan’s adaptation of The Butcher Boy (1997)
©1997, Warner Bros. Pictures
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 121
appearance bestows their imprimatur upon the screen adaptation of their
work – lending it a charge of authorial lustre which will resonate in the
story’s new medium.
Characterising almost all Booker adaptations is a conscious onscreen
reverence for print culture, conceived of in the rather clichéd visual terms
in which cinema tends to flag high-art literariness (Higson, 2006: 74;
Leitch, 2008b: 112). Exquisitely illustrated books, leather-bound first
editions, hushed libraries, dusty archives, creatively tortured authors,
glamorous publishers and disconcertingly well-dressed literary academics
populate the Booker adaptation, as though mustered to evoke in visual
terms the literary prestige of the source text. Here it is the accoutrements
of print culture from centuries past rather than the less atavistic print
culture commodities of the later twentieth or twenty-first centuries that
tend to be fetishised; much like the discipline of book history itself, the
Booker film appears to believe that a book becomes a more venerable and
compelling object the further away its origins are from the present. In the
least critically successful of Booker adaptations, cinema’s unctuousness
towards the book takes the form of fawning voice-overs. Of course the
voice-over has long been a bug-bear of cinema studies in its oedipal quest
to throw off the overweening influence of literary studies in defining
literature as high art (because based on the word) in contrast to cinematic
popular-culture trash (because primarily image-based). This cinema
studies adaptation truism is deliciously parodied in Spike Jonze’s meta-
fictional riff Adaptation, in which anxiety-riddled adapter Charlie
Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) berates himself for lazy use of voice-over in his
draft screenplay – all communicated to the suitably knowing audience via,
you guessed it, voice-over. Yet, film theorists’ rejection of voice-over as
an ostentatiously borrowed and therefore insufficiently cinematic means
of storytelling is not without some basis in the Booker film: the teeth-
grinding sequences in Possession where the characters intone Victorian
poetry either on the soundtrack or directly to each other intradiegetically
only serve to underline how at odds with its metafictional source material
LaBute’s co-written screenplay seems to be.34
More subtle and thought-provoking exercises in filmic cross-referenc-
ing to a Booker pedigree serve explicitly to problematise print culture as
a signifier of power. Consider, for example, the scene in James Ivory’s The
Remains of the Day (1993) where the self-deluding aristocratic British
Nazi sympathiser Lord Darlington reads an anti-Semitic tract in his
library to steel his resolve in dismissing two German Jewish refugee
maids. Thematically similar is the profusion of print culture in Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List (1993), where the accumulating lists, passes, stamps,
posters and endless paperwork underline the immensity of the bureau-
cratic machine administering the Third Reich’s ‘final solution’ (Keneally,
2007: 233). Particularly interesting is the way Schindler’s List presents
print culture as in itself morally neutral, as in the sequence where a
122 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen

Figure 4.3 Moral neutrality of print culture in Schindler’s List (1993): a

professor of literature and history is deemed a ‘non-essential’ worker
© 1993, Universal Pictures

Figure 4.4 Itzhak Stern’s underground hand-press

© 1993, Universal Pictures

professor of literature and history in the Krakow ghetto is branded ‘non-

essential’ in a work detail queue, prompting the Itzhak Stern character
(Ben Kingsley) to hurriedly forge the requisite papers on an underground
hand-press, and then ‘age’ them convincingly with a spilt cup of coffee.
Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film repeatedly employs the device of macro
close-ups of a typewriter, its keys pitilessly hammering out individual
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 123

Figure 4.5 ‘Aging’ the professor’s forged papers with crumpling, gnawing of
corners, and a spilt cup of coffee
© 1993, Universal Pictures

fates, firstly in the list-making of Nazi-party functionaries, and later – this

time with an air of precarious deliverance – in the list of Schindler’s Jewish
factory workers to be saved from annihilation. The device is borrowed
almost shot-for-shot in a later, also justly praised, Booker adaptation: Joe
Wright’s Atonement.35 In the latter film the extreme close-ups and explo-
sive sound effects as Robbie’s typewriter keys punch out in impersonal
Courier font his sexually explicit and personally catastrophic note to
Cecilia are contrasted with the conventionally polite and apologetic
handwritten missive he had intended to send.36 That Wright has spoken
publicly of his dyslexia, and therefore having ‘never read any Ian
McEwan’, casts his onscreen fetishisation of print culture in a particularly
striking light (Dawson, 2007: 4; ‘Boy’, 2007: 19; Solomons, 2008: 36).
Both films are scrupulous in positing print culture as fluidly appropriable.
Print both plays a crucial role in sustaining regimes of power – political,
legal and class-based – but also harbours a subversive and potentially
dangerous self-revelatory quality. In the pivotal sequence in The Remains
of the Day, the ‘sentimental old love story’ that housekeeper Miss Kenton
attempts to pry from the grasp of the suffocatingly repressed butler Mr
Stevens testifies to an emotional life trapped behind his facade of stifling
rectitude and dutiful self-abnegation. Extending this thematic preoccupa-
tion with writing’s protean nature are the number of Booker films in
which letters – misplaced, misdelivered, stolen or hidden – flag writing’s
ability to externalise deeply private emotion, becoming in literary biog-
rapher Janet Malcolm’s exquisite phrase, ‘the fossils of feeling’ (1994:
124 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen

Figure 4.6 Fascination with the mechanics of print culture: Schindler’s List
(1993))
© 1993, Universal Pictures

Figure 4.7 Atonement (2007))

© 2007, Universal Pictures

110). The Booker film, being by virtue of its very production history
hyper-conscious of regimes of literary power, replicates this on screen
through highly charged representations of print (and other) media; it is
as though through reading the textual surface of these adaptations we
might reconstruct the industrial, legal and cultural circumstances of their
creation.
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 125
Schindler’s Ark/List: Searching for Keneally
Most intriguing of all Booker adaptations’ complex relationships with
their print source texts is Schindler’s List. Keneally’s ‘novel’ was pub-
lished in 1982 in the UK and Commonwealth under the title Schindler’s
Ark and in the US under the title Schindler’s List (on the advice –
subsequently regretted by the author – of Dan Green, publishing head of
the book’s US publisher Simon & Schuster) (Keneally, 2007: 159).37 As
is recounted in Keneally’s recent memoir Searching for Schindler (2007),
the novel is a fictionalising of the survival story recounted to Keneally by
Poldek ‘Leopold’ Pfefferberg, a charismatic and voluble Schindler Jew
who by the time of their encounter in 1980 was running a retail business
in Los Angeles. Keneally fleshed out Pfefferberg’s eyewitness account and
detailed character portrait of Oskar Schindler, the ambiguous war-
profiteer and unlikely saviour of hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied
Europe, through 50 in-person interviews on several continents with
surviving Schindlerjuden, visits to key sites in the Schindler story and
painstaking archival research. The classification of Schindler’s Ark as a
novel had been problematic right from the project’s inception. Attempting
to forestall such queries, Keneally included an author’s note as a preface
to the first edition which states in part:

To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course
which has been frequently followed in modern writing. It is the one I
have chosen to follow here; both because the craft of the novelist is
the only craft to which I can lay claim, and because the novel’s tech-
niques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude
as Oskar. I have attempted to avoid all fiction, though, since fiction
would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the
myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar’s
stature.
(1982: 9–10)38

The issue of the book’s genre categorisation was a vexed theme in the
book’s early reviews, one amplified by its Booker shortlisting in 1982 and
which came spectacularly to a head with Keneally’s receipt of that year’s
Booker Prize for Fiction (Keneally, 2007: 168; Trewin, 2008). The Chair
of the judging panel, John Carey, referred explicitly to the controversy
about the book’s genre-bending scope in his prize-announcement speech:

About Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark there’s been some public

debate: is it really fiction? We’re used by now, though, to novels that
build themselves out of facts. It’s a logical conclusion of realism, and
also a natural self-protecting strategy for the novel in an age over-
loaded with newsprint, newsfilm and documentation. We’re used,
too, to the realization that history is, anyway, always a kind of fiction
126 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
– at best a version of and selection from a totality that can never be
known. Keneally shuns make-believe, and that seems the only
honourable course, given the magnitude of the tragedy he has to
relate. . . . It seems to us that it opens a door.39

Debate about the correct category for the book was seized upon by
journalists in Keneally’s immediately post-win press conference at which
the author, primed by several drinks and in sound-bite mode, made the off-
the-cuff quip that the book must be a novel ‘because the judges thought
so, and who am I to argue with them?’ (Keneally, 2007: 168). Of course,
such a convenient journalistic angle for the story of that year’s winner
constituted another useful scandal of the kind for which the Booker had
already by the early 1980s become famous; as Keneally notes, ‘like most
controversy, it initiated a frenzy of interest in the book’ (2007: 168). The
attendant scandal, combined with the importance of the book’s subject
and its critical plaudits, made a tremendous and immediate sales impact:
a letter in the Booker archive from Keneally’s publisher at Hodder &
Stoughton, Ion Trewin (now Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes),
recalls an ‘avalanche’ of resulting sales with ‘orders for some 5,000 copies’
having been taken the day following the announcement; another letter, this
time from Hodder & Stoughton Publicity Manager, Monica Cunningham,
dated some nine days after the televised award, records ‘staggering’ sales
(Booker archive, 1982 file; Keneally, 2007: 170; Trewin, 2008). Spielberg,
as has been recounted, was alerted to this promisingly cinematic and
artistically weighty property and lost no time in pursuing the film rights.
However, the rights situation for Schindler’s Ark/List was complicated by
the fact that the rights to Schindler’s story (what would now likely be
termed ‘life rights’) had been sold to MGM by a hard-up Schindler for
US$50,000 in the early 1960s, although the studio had done nothing
subsequently with them (Keneally, 2007: 25–27). Hence Spielberg’s
lawyers at Universal had both to extricate these rights from MGM as well
as to secure the screen rights to Keneally’s novel (under both its US and
UK titles, to prevent any rival project with a similar name emerging to
spook investors and confuse the film-going public) (Trewin, 2008).
Even once the various rights and permissions conundrums were
resolved, the process of bring Schindler’s List to the screen over the course
of the subsequent decade was, as Keneally recounts in his memoir, both
convoluted and arduous.40 Regretting his decision to accede to US pub-
lisher pressure in renaming the book, Keneally attempted to get Spielberg
to title his film adaptation after the UK edition – as Schindler’s Ark.
Spielberg, however, declined, stating that the Old Testament motif of the
Ark was a metaphor not easily realisable for cinema audiences reared on
naturalism, but that lists were tangible things which could be powerfully
emblematised on the screen: ‘From start to finish it would be a matter of
lists’ (2007: 233). Hence it is clear that Spielberg’s attention was drawn
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 127
to the book by the publicity attendant on its Booker win, and also that
the completed film’s profusion of print culture artefacts was a key element
in Spielberg’s creative planning from the earliest stages of the project’s
development.
Yet for Spielberg’s movie, the existence of Keneally’s book as mediating
text between first-hand survival account and testamentary film is
troubling, complicating the film’s claims to historical ‘re-creation’. With
its cinéma-vérité black-and-white imagery, its neo-documentary ambi-
tions, and its onscreen walk-past at the close of many of the real Jewish
survivors portrayed in the film, Spielberg’s film appears acutely cognisant
of its role in debates about the (lamentably still-disputed) historical
veracity of the Holocaust (Fogel, 1994: 315, 320; Gelley, 1997: 10, 16).
It is thus everywhere at pains to ensure that cinematic techniques are not
seen to discredit the memory of those millions murdered under the Third
Reich. In his director’s notes to the 2004 DVD release of Schindler’s List,
Spielberg writes: ‘Virtually everything I’ve seen on the Holocaust is in
black and white, so my vision of the Holocaust is what I’ve seen in docu-
mentaries and in books, which have largely been stark black and white
images’. Elaborating upon his choice of film-making aesthetics for this
project, Spielberg conceives of his own role in uncharacteristically non-
fictional terms:

I tried to be as close to a journalist in recording this re-creation, more

than being a film maker trying to heighten the suspense or action or
the pathos. The black and white and hand-held camera gives [sic] the
film a sort of cinema verite, documentary feel. It embodied the truth
we were trying to explore and communicate what happened. It made
it seem more real, somehow.

Tellingly, the film opens with barely any credit sequence, as though to
dispel at the outset fears of ‘Hollywood-isation’ in Spielberg’s treatment
of the Holocaust – a critical anxiety much articulated during the years of
the project’s incubation. Most unusually for a Booker winner, the exist-
ence of Keneally’s work as source text is explicitly signalled to cinema
audiences for the first time only in the third title of the closing credits,
which reads ‘Based on the Novel by / Thomas Keneally’. It is as though
the film were trepidatious of the distorting connotations of the term
‘fiction’ itself; certainly the film’s credits nowhere mention the book’s
pedigree as a winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction. The finished surface
of the cinema text in this respect stands in marked contrast to the closed
ecosystem of the film’s production: Keneally recalls that when visiting the
set of Schindler’s List he was gratified to observe that Spielberg shot with
marked-up corresponding pages of Steven Zaillian’s screenplay and of
Keneally’s novel clipped side by side at the base of his monitor. With
disarming modesty, Keneally confides that he was ‘delighted to see the
128 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
pages there’ as ‘it gave [Spielberg’s] invitation to me to attend the set a
marginal validity which I was relieved to possess’ (2007: 259–60).41
Schindler’s List is both preoccupied at a thematic level with the appro-
priability of print culture, while wary of the implications of this idea in
terms of the film’s own marketing and reception. Schindler’s List thus
represents the most extreme example of the contradictory attraction–
repulsion dynamic film-makers have long manifested with regard to
Booker texts. Admiring their literary prestige, narrative power and
depiction of a richly realised world, film-makers nevertheless venture into
difficult terrain in trying to convey these same literary qualities in an
audio-visual medium. Yet at the same time, film-makers remain power-
fully aware that in order to impress their cinematic peers and mass
audiences the film must, in the blunt words of Minghella, ‘stop kneeling
in front of the novel and stand up for itself’ (Wolf, 1997: 19).

Conclusion
What is clear, then, is that literary prizes matter. The fact is demonstrated
beyond dispute by the sheer volume of media coverage dedicated to them,
and makes itself felt even by omission when a film adaptation such as
Schindler’s List takes pains to avoid mentioning them. Certainly the
Booker Prize has become well-recognised for its role in constructing a
virtual canon of contemporary post-colonial and postmodern fiction,
and popularising such challenging work for diverse readerships. More
recently, literary scholars have come belatedly to recognise and analyse
the Booker’s powerful institutional role: it does not stand outside of
the literary system, impartially bestowing laurels on its best and finest
products; rather, the Booker has fundamentally changed the structure of
the literary field itself. It has altered the time of year at which prize-
aspirant literary fiction is published, its packaging, retail display, and
reception by interpretive communities such as literary studies pro-
grammes and private book clubs.42 But what literary studies has not to
date adequately recognised – a lacuna the present chapter seeks to address
– is that the ripple effect of ‘Bookerisation’ extends far beyond the para-
meters of the book industry and in fact registers perceptibly on the
broader mediasphere: the now year-long campaign culminating in the
announcement of a singular winner consumes column inches, broadcast
time and, increasingly, web pages; Booker shortlisting radically increases
a title’s chances of adaptation for screen media; and a story’s prize-
winning DNA can be clearly discerned in the extra- and intradiegetic
markers of Booker screen adaptations. Film-makers continue avidly to
cultivate literary fiction’s associations of cultural prestige, just as they
attempt the complex alchemy of transmuting that literary esteem to a
quite different audio-visual medium. This chapter’s case studies of a
number of Booker-shortlisted screen adaptations attempt to explore the
 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen 129

Figure 4.8 Front cover design of the published screenplay of The English
Patient (1997), jointly credited to director Anthony Minghella and
author Michael Ondaatje
© Anthony Minghella and Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient: A Screenplay,
Methuen Drama, an imprint of A&C Black Publishers Ltd
130 Literary Prize-Winners on Screen
Booker’s important incubator role in the contemporary adaptation
economy. More broadly, the discussion also aims to gauge where contem-
porary literary fiction fits in today’s media system.
One benefit of Bourdieu’s productive concept of the cultural ‘field’ is
that it rejects simplistic centre–periphery models of influence (such as the
metaphor of ripples emanating from a cast stone employed above) and
permits us to see how, in the complexly interdependent structure of the
field, changing a single element triggers myriad other changes amongst
existing agents. With this in mind, it is possible to understand not only
how the Booker influences screen media by driving adaptation traffic, but
how those same adaptations generate a powerful feedback effect for the
book industry. Just as the Booker film aims to transmute literary critical
esteem into an audio-visual vocabulary, so too the book industry eagerly
appropriates to itself a film adaptation’s critical plaudits. Witness the
strategic release of film tie-in editions, published screenplays, spin-off
and companion titles (explored in detail in the following chapter). For
example, even prior to the Academy Award success of Minghella’s film
The English Patient, the drip-feed of festival buzz and laudatory early
reviews ensured that tie-in editions of the book began appearing in
bestseller lists in multiple publishing territories. Furthermore, Minghella’s
screenplay (1997), itself packaged with a tie-in cover design utilising the
film’s poster art, achieved significant profile (Korte and Schneider, 2000:
94). Most astounding of all, a companion-themed edition of Tales from
Herodotus (1997) (an important intertext in both the novel and film) was
released by the usually sedate Penguin Classics imprint with the strapline
‘As featured in The English Patient’ reproduced at the same size as the
book’s title on its front cover. This unlikely publishing package also
proceeded to mount the bestseller lists, partly on account of it being
displayed at point of sale in bookshops along with gift-book and ‘novelty’
non-book items. Writing in direct response to these phenomena, an again
rather curmudgeonly Robert McCrum lamented at the time that ‘film and
fiction are becoming so interbred that it will soon be meaningless to
fuss over the distinction to be drawn between a new script and a new
novel’ (1997: 15) – an observation highly reminiscent of the ‘twin-track’
approach to contemporary authorship explored in Chapter 1. But our
response to this phenomenon need not be so testy. The general public’s
familiarity with, and appetite for, Booker titles is increasingly mediated
via film and TV adaptations. Even the Booker Prize has come to define
itself publicly as in part a content incubator for esteemed screen adapta-
tions. Such accelerating twenty-first-century developments highlight the
fact that there is no longer a discernible ‘literary’ ecosystem, only a
literary sphere of an encompassing media system (Korte and Schneider,
2000: 105). McCrum is correct to the extent that, in an era characterised
by avid adaptation, impermeable boundaries between media can – and
need – no longer be drawn.
5 Best Adapted Screenwriter?
The Intermedial Figure
of the Screenwriter in
the Contemporary
Adaptation Industry

In Hollywood, screenwriters are bottom of the food chain – whatever goes

wrong, it’s always the writer’s fault.
(Joe Penhall, quoted in Lindrea, 2004)

Film is not just a writer’s medium – it isn’t a writer’s medium at all really.
(Ruth Prawer Jhabvala inSwaim, 1993)

I’m more of a book guy than a movie guy.

(Charlie Kaufman (the real one), quoted in Zalewski, 2002b: 2.1)

Let us return to adaptation studies’ favourite metafictional, self-reflexive

meditation: Spike Jonze’s inspired film Adaptation. In the film’s opening
scene, the character of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) lurks
in the background of what an onscreen title would have us believe is the
shooting of Jonze’s earlier, breakout feature, Being John Malkovich (1999)
(also scripted by Charlie Kaufman). Sloppily dressed, socially awkward
and painfully redundant to the process at hand, Kaufman is given to
stealing furtive smiles and waves at Malkovich’s stars, John Cusack and
Catherine Keener, who glance blankly at this industry hanger-on with the
studied indifference of the famous going about their business amongst the
plebeian wannabes. As the pseudo-documentary-style camera passes down
though the on-set hierarchy of John Malkovich as the film’s eponymous
star, to the first assistant director and then the cinematographer, Kaufman
(identified in another onscreen title as ‘Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter’) is
peremptorily ordered out of the soundstage by the assistant director, with
the reprimand ‘You. You’re in the eyeline. Can you please get off the
stage?’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 3). Banished outside into the harsh
Californian sunshine, the screenwriter is assailed by his customary anxiety
and depression, wondering despondently ‘What am I doing here? Why did
I bother to come here today? Nobody even seems to know my name’ (3).
If the adapted literary author is inclined to feel a mere hanger-on when
visiting a film set (as explored in Chapter 1), it appears the adapted screen-
writer fares little better.1 Indeed, the onscreen Kaufman strikes a new low,
132 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
even for his despised breed; as the film’s later scenes of a furtively mastur-
bating Kaufman attest, he is unable so much as to find the apocryphal
starlet dumb enough to sleep with the writer.
Though presented in the manner of ‘behind-the-scenes footage shot
with a hand-held video camera’, Adaptation’s opening scene is in fact
fictional (2002: 2). Yet it brilliantly encapsulates and expresses catharti-
cally the long pent-up frustration and disgruntlement of an entire pro-
fession – the film-industry screenwriter, especially its subset of the
Hollywood screenwriter. It is not for nothing that Adaptation won the
2003 best screenplay prize at the PEN Center USA West Literary Awards
(Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002).2 Although essential to film and television
production, the contribution of screenwriters has been systematically
marginalised from the earliest era of the film industry’s development.
Screenwriters’ legal rights over their work, claims to artistic recognition
and financial rewards have all been either dismissed as irrelevant in a low-
status undertaking such as film-making or, as film came to be accorded
artistic prestige on a par with its commercial heft, have been encroached
upon by other screen industry professionals eager to advance their own
claims to cultural and economic capital. Mirroring this industrial slight-
ing has been academic literary and film studies’ long-standing, studied
obliviousness to the screenwriter (Nelmes, 2007; Maras, 2009: 7).
Breaking down neatly upon medium-specific lines, literary studies found
the innately intermedial and often collaboratively written screenplay
impossible to square with the Romanticised figure of the solitary author
that had been enshrined in the discipline’s very theoretical and method-
ological foundations. Conversely, screen studies, seeking as ever to over-
throw an intellectually overweening and often sneeringly patronising
literary-studies paradigm, chose as its opening intellectual manoeuvre a
rigorous examination of screen aesthetics and visual stylistics – by default
rendering the written screenplay too literary an artefact to excite screen
studies’ new guard. The eclipse of the screenwriter by other claimants to
academic attention was near-complete once French-inspired auteur theory
nominated the director as film’s authorial proxy and governing artistic
consciousness.
Much of this disciplinary history may be familiar from its recounting
in the current volume’s Introduction, for this fate of being exiled simul-
taneously from two disciplinary camps is exactly the reason for adapta-
tion studies’ own long relegation to the margins of academic legitimacy
and institutional respectability. How curious then that adaptation studies
should itself have dismissed the figure of the screenwriter as readily as had
its foundation disciplines (Boozer, 2008: 3; Price, 2010: 57). Perhaps this
disregard stems from the adapted screenplay’s status as both explicitly
unoriginal as well as implicitly intermedial. It thereby appeared to exacer-
bate both of the problems with which adaptations studies was already
wrestling and threatened to provide yet more rhetorical ammunition to
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 133
the fledgling discipline’s institutionally more powerful disciplinary
opponents. Perhaps adaptation studies’ disregard of the screenwriter can
be traced also to more methodological and theoretical concerns. Until the
recent boom in screenplay publishing, print versions of shooting scripts
were difficult to come by and therefore constituted less readily accessible
empirical material than the traditional resources of the literary novel, on
one hand, and prints or video recordings of the adapted films themselves
on the other. Adaptation studies may moreover have been influenced
by the screen industries’ comparative indifference to the screenwriter,
with a paucity of detailed commentary in the industry trade press
functioning to reinforce scholarly silence around this vital film-making
role. Furthermore, adaptation studies to a large extent replicated screen
studies’ romance of the directorial auteur, spawning variant studies
on topics such as Hitchcock’s reworking of print source material or
Truffaut’s screen adaptations. This was presumably because the second-
(or third-)hand adoption of French post-war auteur theory lent a
theoretical sheen to adaptation studies – a discipline which has been, until
recently, notably adverse to thoroughgoing theoretical self-reflection.
Distained by mainstream cinema studies for its theoretical parochialism,
adaptation studies attempted to curry intellectual favour by adopting
the cineastes’ own dominant theoretical paradigm, despite its frequently
poor fit. For all of these complex and mutually reinforcing reasons, the
study of the adapted screenplay and its writer(s) has, until very recent
years, remained thoroughly off the scholarly radar, to the detriment of all
parties.
Inclusion of the screenwriter in a book about the contemporary adap-
tation industry is crucial because it is in the figure of the screenwriter that
the literary and filmic spheres most demonstrably converge. The very term
‘screenwriter’ suggests the fundamentally intermedial skill set required to
construct, in screenwriting guru Syd Field’s phrase, ‘a story told with
pictures’ (1979: 3). The screenplay is the essential document used for
raising production finance and is the basis upon which screen talent
typically becomes ‘attached’ to a project (Acheson and Maule, 2005:
314–15). The choices made by screenwriters in composing their scripts to
a large degree set up the range of narrative and aesthetic decisions to be
made by a film’s major visual stylists, such as the director, cinematog-
rapher and production designer (Rimmer, 2001: 131). Moreover, as the
document that establishes a blueprint for the finished film, the shooting
script can prefigure to a large extent issues of audience engagement with
and reaction to a text, especially depending upon the degree to which the
script is seen to remain ‘faithful’ to or depart from a familiar source text.
Except for the very rare instances of improvisational or perhaps reality-
inspired, semi-documentary film-making, all screen productions involve
the input of screenwriters at their formative stages (Maras, 2009: 2).
More specifically for the purposes of the current project, all adaptation
134 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
industry traffic necessarily passes through the nodal point of the screen-
writer. The present study has argued throughout for relinquishing the
inherited idea of the book and screen worlds as two discrete industries
which collaborate only on occasion, to reconfigure them instead as rela-
tive centres within a single, overarching, converged adaptation industry.
But it is in this chapter that the balance of the current volume shifts
decisively away from a model of the book industries as assiduously cul-
tivating engagement with the screen industries (as has dominated in
Chapters 1–4), to examine an industry figure liminally positioned between
these two industry sectors, and more beholden to the screen world than
to the print one, for all screenwriters’ frequent authorial identification.
The screenwriter’s essential professional skill lies precisely in effecting a
form of creative simultaneous translation between the semiotic systems of
both print and screen domains, reconstituting the effects of one in the
formal vocabulary of the other. While such translation metaphors are a
commonplace in adaptation studies at the level of textual analysis, little
attention has thus far been paid to the industrial role of the screenwriter
as the key figure undertaking such translations.

Theorising Screenwriting and the Screenwriter

For the reasons outlined above, academic neglect of screenwriting has
tended to be pervasive, relegating the topic to ‘a semi-virgin field’ with ‘all
screenwriters “Subjects for Further Research”’ (Stempel, 1988: xi; Corliss,
1975: xxvi). Such publications about screenwriting as do exist have tended
to fall into the decidedly non-academic categories of the industry memoir
or the how-to manual. A number of prominent Hollywood screenwriters,
acutely conscious of public obliviousness to their profession’s filmic
contribution, have penned insider accounts of Hollywood as seen from
the writer’s perspective. Amongst these, William Goldman’s satirical
Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) and Which Lie Did I Tell?: More
Adventures in the Screen Trade (2001) have justly become classics. In a
similar vein, Lenore Coffee provided an early account of a female screen-
writer’s career in Storyline: Recollections of a Hollywood Screenwriter
(1973), and Larry McMurtry (co-writer of the screen-adapted Brokeback
Mountain (2005), discussed below) has penned a record of his screen-
writerly experience within both the film and television industries in Film
Flam: Essays on Hollywood (1987). Informative, anecdotal and suffused
with first-hand knowledge as these books undoubtedly are, they do not
attempt to provide a rigorously analytical or fully theorised study of
screenwriters’ role in Hollywood’s contemporary globalised image culture.
Scholars attempting to construct such an macro-oriented view of the
contemporary adaptation industry might be tempted to consult the other
established genre of screenwriting publications – how-to guides for writ-
ing screenplays. These texts are thoroughly – even obdurately – practical
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 135
in orientation, often explicitly addressing their imagined reader of the
aspirant screenwriter in second-person voice: ‘This is a practical book. I
hope it will be useful at every stage of your adaptation’ (Seger, 1992: xv).
Given this avowedly hands-on and vocational intention, the screenwriting
manual is characterised by a highly prescriptive, often domineering, rule-
seeking approach to analysing screenplays, being concerned less with
innovation than emulation of market-tested formulae. Itemisation of
three-act plot structures, pseudo-geometric character arcs and models of
inter-character conflict predominate in the genre. The earlier mentioned
screenwriting guru Syd Field’s Screenplay (1979), a prototype of many
such works, is currently in its fourth edition. Similarly, Robert McKee’s
Story (1999), derived from his famous screenwriting seminars, has
become so well-known that McKee scored his own impersonation in
Spike Jonze’s Adaptation as the voice of screenwriting authority coun-
selling a frazzled and creatively blocked Charlie Kaufman to ‘wow them
in the end and you got a hit’ (Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 70). The
proliferation and reliable sales of such titles demonstrate for publishers a
sizeable segment of the public hungry to try their hand at screenplay
writing. But from an academic perspective, the leadenly descriptive and
emulative bent of such texts renders them virtually worthless in terms of
critically understanding the role of screenwriters in the contemporary
screen economy, let alone its adaptation industry subset.
The origins of a theoretically self-conscious school of screenwriting
analysis can be found in stirrings of discontent during the 1970s and
1980s with cinema studies’ orthodoxies of auteur theory. British political
economist Graham Murdock has traced the wholesale critical sidelining
of the screenwriter in the film and television industries to even earlier,
pointing the finger at cinema’s silent origins: ‘The fact that it was silent
for the first thirty years of its existence led to the elevation of stars and
directors and the virtual eclipse of the writer as a significant figure’ (1980:
24). But this industrial reality did not become rationalised and perpetu-
ated academically until the 1960s importation of Cahiers du Cinéma-style
auteur theory into US film criticism to bolster the intellectual reach and
institutional profile of the fledgling discipline. The auteurist contention
that certain directors possess such a distinctive stylistic signature that they
can be considered the guiding creative spirit of ‘their’ films effectively
demoted all other behind-the-scenes creative film workers to the role of
mere artisans, conscientiously dedicated to realising the visions of the
genius–director. While conceived by its original proponents such as
François Truffaut as a protest against the cinematic timidity of a certain
kind of post-war French literary adaptation, auteur theory had the
perhaps ironic effect of reinforcing literary criticism’s enshrining of the
Romanticised author figure over and above the cultural system within
which such creators work. Film theorist Dana Polan has pointed out
that auteurist criticism has, in the decades since its first Anglophone
136 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
articulation, responded to its many critics by generating new, more
nuanced permutations – anointing women auteurs, non-Hollywood
auteurs, the producer as auteur, the studio system as auteur – to the extent
that ‘auteurs are now everywhere, not just in the stratum of directors’
(2001). But in the theoretical land-grab led by critical proponents of
film industry personnel such as stars, producers, and – it should be added
– film critics and theorists themselves, the screenwriter emphatically
lost out.
So it is that rhetorical salvos against ‘the pernicious auteur theory’
constitute a unifying thread between the few academic works about
screenwriting to have emerged in recent decades (Dunne, 1988: vii; Maras,
2009: 97–100). A prime figure amongst such critics, Richard Corliss,
lamented as early as 1970 the ‘retarding’ effect of auteur theory, with its
overvaluation of the creative contribution of the director virtually eclipsing
the artistic input of other film personnel (1992 [1970]: 607). According to
Corliss, such studies amounted to ‘an endless coronation of the director as
benevolent despot, in his [sic] enshrinement as solitary artist, with his
collaborating craftsmen functioning merely as paint, canvas, bowl of fruit,
and patron’ (1975: xviii). Contesting such historical marginalisation,
studies by Corliss, as well as those by Tom Stempel (1988) and Marsha
McCreadie (2006), unearthed case studies of notable screenwriters from
Hollywood’s golden age, focussing (in McCreadie’s case) specifically on
women screenwriters. Corliss has also challenged traditional auteurist
precepts in calling provocatively for analysis of ‘the Screenwriter as
Auteur’ and for an alternative ‘politique des collaborateurs’ in which the
complex mesh of creative inputs by the gamut of personnel responsible for
a film’s creation would be given due academic weight (1975: xxii, xxiii).
Amongst these many ignored figures, Corliss acknowledges that the
screenwriter of adapted materials is often the very lowest rung on the
critical ladder:

A screenwriter is, as often as not, the middleman between the author

of the original property and the director – and the man [sic] who gets
his hands on the flypaper last is the one whose fingerprints will show
up first.
(1975: xxvii)

A framework for film analysis that corrects auteurism’s individualistic

focus and tendency towards Romanticised hero-worship might be closer
to Robert Carringer’s proposal for ‘an institutional context of author-
ship’, in which the misleadingly singular focus on the director is replaced
by attention to the intermeshing artistic contributions of a cluster of film
professionals including, inter alia, the screenwriter (2001: 377). A key
contention of such an analysis is that all creative figures should be viewed
within an industrial and economic framework which is acknowledged
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 137
both to enable certain kinds of artistic decision-making and to discourage
or even prevent others.
Amongst the Corliss school (if I may term them that) of critics
contesting screenwriting’s academic marginalisation, William Miller
strikes an unusually optimistic note. Writing in 1980, he regrets that the
‘the screenwriter is so often the forgotten man [sic] in filmmaking . . .
shunted to the side much as a slightly embarrassing distant relative at a
formal reunion’, but adds that ‘I think this situation is changing and that
we will soon have a critical re-evaluation of the screenwriter and his [sic]
contribution to the completed film’ (9–10). Miller’s optimism may have
been premature, but it has ultimately been vindicated with recent years’
veritable new wave of screenwriting studies and dedicated academic fora.
In 2008 the inaugural Screenwriting Conference was hosted at Leeds in
the UK, with the following year’s event convened in Helsinki. An asso-
ciated Screenwriting Research Network was also established to sustain
digital communication in the hiatus between annual meetings. Deriving
many of its submissions from these important scholarly networks, the
new Journal of Screenwriting was launched by academic press Intellect in
Bristol in 2009. Noting the previously scant and scattered appearance of
academic journal articles about screenwriting, the fledgling journal’s
editors announced that ‘the screenplay has been a remarkably neglected
area of study; it is the intention of this journal to at least partly address
this’, making it ‘the first peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to
screenwriting in the world’ (Nelmes, 2009: 5; Macdonald, 2009: 7).
Committing to walking its academic talk, the Journal of Screenwriting
adopts a referencing system giving equal weight to both a film’s director
and its screenwriter(s) (where these are different individuals) (Nelmes,
2009: 4). Unsurprisingly, given previous critical studies of screenwriting
had tended to cohere around opposition to the disciplinary effects of
auteur theory, the Journal of Screenwriting’s first issue contained three
articles explicitly challenging auteur theory’s critical myopia and
distortions of collaborative industrial practices.
It is striking that the critical study of screenwriting has achieved these
characteristic signs of disciplinary maturity – an annual conference,
dedicated journal, and internet forum – at exactly the same time as adap-
tation studies was experiencing its own wave of theoretical rejuvenation
and institutional profile-building through the launch of the international
Association of Literature on Screen Studies and the journals Adaptation
and Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance (as outlined in this
volume’s Introduction). An intriguing point of confluence between these
two contemporaneous streams of academic innovation can be found in
Jack Boozer’s edited anthology Authorship in Film Adaptation (2008),
which focusses on the vexed role of the screenwriter vis-à-vis the more
culturally established figures of the novelist and director. After a valuable
survey of screenwriting’s disciplinary fate, Boozer argues convincingly for
138 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
elevation of the study of the screenplay as a ‘script intertext’ between the
book and the film. He proposes possible study of screenplay drafts in their
plural form to better appreciate the dynamic industrial processes – not
only the completed textual product – of adaptation (a theme returned to
at this chapter’s close) (24). In this focus on the screenplay as the crucial
mediating document between creative sectors, Boozer’s book joins
important recent monographs by Steven Maras (2009) and Steven Price
(2010) in placing the screenplay front and centre of its theoretical and
analytic concerns and attempting to forge a hybrid theoretical framework
attuned to the complexities and contradictions of this key artefact of
contemporary culture. The figure of the screenwriter has, it seems, finally
been welcomed back onto the metaphorical soundstage and belatedly
been accorded its proper place in film-making’s creative ecosystem.

The Option Process and Screenwriterly Attachment to

Projects
Having sketched the shifting academic fortunes of the screenwriter as a
recognised input into the film-making process generally, it is appropriate
now to focus attention on the professional life of screenwriters work-
ing specifically on adaptations. The following discussion focusses on the
crucial legal processes of options and rights sales agreements, as well as
on the various industrial means by which screenwriters may become
attached to adaptation projects. As outlined in previous chapters, film and
television rights (collectively termed ‘screen rights’) are commonly the
most valuable subsidiary rights in a literary property, and it is for this
reason that virtually all authors with literary representation will quaran-
tine these rights from the author–publisher contract (Holt, 1979: 135;
Blake, 1999: 276). Hence a film industry party wanting to acquire screen
rights to a book property commonly negotiates with an author via their
literary agent in a two-stage process. An option agreement and rights sale
contract are typically negotiated and signed at the same time, though
enacted sequentially (Banki, 1982: 2; Bedford, 1985: 6; Seger, 1992;
Lazarus, 2005: 10; Cirile, 2006: 43). An option agreement guarantees a
party the exclusive right to develop an adaptation project for a specified
period (typically one year) in exchange for a pre-determined fee. A
number of annual renewals of the option may be contractually permitted,
although these will often involve an escalating and non-refundable option
fee to ensure that the film-industry party is actively developing an adap-
tation project rather than simply stockpiling rights in literary properties.
In the eyes of agents and authors, the risk of taking screen rights off the
market – as represented by a longer option period – must be offset by an
increased option fee; to quote once more (in)famous US literary agent
Andrew Wylie: ‘Limit the licence and push up the fees, that’s what it’s all
about’ (Arnold, 2000: E3; see also Raftos, 1988: 5). Canny agents or
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 139
authors with sufficient industry leverage may even be able to negotiate a
contractual requirement that the option-holder supply project updates as
a pre-requisite for option renewal (Lazarus, 2005: 9–10; McColl, 2009).
Should an adaptation project be successful in gaining conditional
finance and attachment of onscreen and production talent, it may move
into the second stage of the legal adaptation process: the enactment of the
rights transfer contract or purchase agreement. As mentioned previously,
this contact is always negotiated and signed at the same time as the option
agreement, and the two agreements are further intermeshed by the option
price being commonly calculated as 5–10 per cent of the total rights sale
amount (Raftos, 1988: 5; Lazarus, 2005: 9). But, as explored in Chapter
4 in relation to Booker Prize-shortlisted adaptations, the proportion of
optioned literary properties that actually survive the option process to
achieve the assignment of rights stage is estimated to be as low as 10 per
cent, unsurprising given the contingencies and inherent instability of every
aspect of the film-making process (Holt, 1979: 138; Blake, 1999: 276).
This characteristic complexity and unpredictability of the adaptation
industry has given rise to legions of anecdotes by authors who had the
screen rights to their books eagerly snapped up by screen industry players
only to be met thereafter with thundering silence from once-fawning film
contacts.
The author’s fee under a rights sale contract is typically around 1–3 per
cent of the proposed film’s total budget and contracts typically stipulate
that this is to be paid on the first day of principal photography (‘So’, 1982:
6; Bradley, 2005: 13; McColl, 2009). Astute authors – once again
commonly advised by canny agents – arrange for payment upfront by the
film’s producers rather than agreeing to receive the author’s share as a
percentage of the film’s gross (or even worse, net) profits (Bedford, 1985:
6; Raftos, 1988: 6; ‘Film’, 1995: 6; McColl, 2009). Once again, periodi-
cals produced by author groups such as the UK’s Society of Authors are
filled with tales of woe by beleaguered authors who agreed to such
deferred payments only to find that Hollywood’s creative accounting had
rendered even a blockbuster film adaptation an ostensible loss-maker on
the studio’s books. Because the relationship between the various nodes
on the adaptation industry network is a Bourdieusian one of inherent
competition and strategic alliance, the professional status and bargaining
skills of the various book and screen industry figures are crucial in
determining the specifics of an adaptation contract. For example, more
prominent authors may be able to negotiate (via their agents) a rights
reversion clause whereby screen rights to a book property will revert to
the author if the adaptation is not produced within a specified period of
time (‘So’, 1982: 6). Similarly, the contracting phase is the point at which
a rarefied group of star authors (as outlined in Chapter 1) may exploit
their work’s market prominence and scarcity value to secure contractual
perks such as an executive producer credit on a screen adaptation of their
140 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
work or a script consultant fee, thus increasing their direct revenue from
the adaptation as well as maximising authorial control over the creative
property (Bedford, 1985: 6; Pristin, 1997; Hampton, 2007: v; Wilson,
2008). For example, Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize-winning
author J.M. Coetzee negotiated with Australian-based independent
screenwriter–director partnership Anna-Maria Monticelli and Steve
Jacobs a screen rights sale agreement giving Coetzee approval over the
final screenplay adapted from his post-Apartheid novel Disgrace (which
opts for a slightly more optimistic ending than does Coetzee’s relentlessly
bleak book). Moreover, Coetzee’s UK literary agent David Higham took
the unusual step of having the film’s producers sign a confidentiality
agreement embargoing any details of how they obtained the notoriously
publicity-averse Coetzee’s approval for their project or the script changes
(Baum, 2006: 43). Writers of lesser literary renown may, on the other
hand, be kept at arm’s length from screenwriters adapting their work:
Susan Orlean writes of meeting Charlie Kaufman for the first time late in
the Adaptation shoot, and ‘I was too embarrassed to say much to him,
and he seemed too embarrassed to say much to me’ (Kaufman and
Kaufman, 2002: ix).
The legal rights to adapt a book property having been secured by a
screen industry party, there are various ways in which a specific screen-
writer may become attached to the project. Adapted scripts may, as in the
example of Disgrace (2008), be self-generated by screenwriters themselves
– known in the trade as ‘spec scripts’ (Seger, 1992). This do-it-yourself
approach is more common in small- to medium-budget film-making for
the obvious reason that only a modestly budgeted film would contain the
option and rights-purchasing costs within the financial reach of an
individual (or small group of individuals). A notable instance of screen-
writers actively pursuing, contracting and developing rights to a literary
property in such an independent manner is screenwriters Dianna Ossana
and Larry McMurtry’s purchase from Annie Proulx of the rights to
her short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’.3 Ossana has written of being so
moved by reading Proulx’s short story in a 1997 issue of the New Yorker
that she immediately contacted Proulx’s literary agent, purchased the
rights with her and McMurtry’s own money, and agreed to Proulx having
consultation rights on draft scripts as well as final script approval (Proulx,
McMurtry and Ossana, 2006: 143–51).4 The financial and creative risks
contingent upon such independent project development are enormous:
Brokeback Mountain’s depiction of a gay love story between two 1960s
Wyoming ranch hands doomed the project to seven years in the industry
limbo known as ‘turnaround’ (146). While Ossana and McMurtry’s
script was widely regarded within the film industry as brilliantly accom-
plished, it was seen as unlikely to secure lead actors willing to risk their
box-office reputations by playing gay characters in an explicitly homo-
erotic story (Murray, 2007d; Boozer, 2008: 17).
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 141
The second, by far more common, process by which a scriptwriter
becomes attached to a screen adaptation is through commissioning – also
known as working ‘on assignment’ (Cirile, 2006: 42). The studio-system
production line of in-house screenwriters and script editors that
dominated Hollywood until the post-World War II Paramount Decree is
now resolutely a thing of the past, replaced by a post-Fordist, freelance-
dominated network of temporary contracts which film historian Janet
Staiger has termed the ‘package unit system’ (1985: 571; see also Wyatt,
1994: 68; Acheson and Maule, 2005: 326; Pokorny, 2005: 277; Gomery,
2009: 30; Scott, 2009: 164). As a result, many screenwriters now first
become aware of potential script opportunities after being contacted
through their agents by producers who have already secured screen rights
(Bielby and Bielby, 1999: 65; Boozer, 2008: 17; Conor, 2009: 32). A
screenwriter working on commission may be approached to discuss at
length their ideas for an adapted script with the producers and director to
test the waters of creative compatibility, then to write various synopses or
treatments of a literary property, before finally being given the studio’s
go-ahead and receiving a formal contract (Lazarus, 2005: 65–66;
Weinberg, 2006). In such a market-based model of attaching screen-
writers to adaptation projects, a successful track record in similar projects
is clearly vital (Lazarus, 2005: 63). It is through such work-for-hire
channels that, for example, screenwriter Robin Swicord became attached
to the film adaptation of Arthur Golden’s bestselling Memoirs of a Geisha
(1998; 2005), assisted by her previous adapted scripts for ‘women-
focussed’ properties such as Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Little
Women (1994) (Weinberg, 2006). Similarly, Charlie Kaufman was com-
missioned by producers to pen the screenplay of Susan Orlean’s The
Orchid Thief (1998) on the basis of his breakout success with his wildly
iconoclastic script for Being John Malkovich (Kaufman and Kaufman,
2002: 121; Libby, 2002; Zalewski, 2002b). (It is impossible in this
context not to think of the nervous, sweating, fictional Charlie Kaufman’s
Hollywood lunch with glamorous film producer Valerie (Tilda Swinton)
in which she schmoozes him by proclaiming ‘We all just loved the
Malkovich script. . . . Boy I’d love to find a portal into your brain’
(Kaufman and Kaufman, 2002: 4).) For the freelance screenwriter work-
ing within such an uncertain and fluid economy, securing representation
by a well-recognised and amply networked agent is essential to maintain-
ing industry profile and a steady flow of work. In the credentialising
phrasing of film industry sociologists William T. Bielby and Denise D.
Bielby, ‘Representation by an elite agency authenticates a writer’s repu-
tation’ (1999: 81).
There is, finally, a third way in which screenwriters may become
attached to projects which reflects the increasingly multinational and
cross-sectoral reach of talent agencies, as outlined at the close of Chapter
2. Large agencies spanning literary, acting, directing and screenwriting
142 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
sectors (known as ‘full-service’ agencies) may ‘package’ talent so as to
combine clients across multiple sectors, and then pitch the whole to a
studio in exchange for 10 per cent of the total film budget (as opposed to
securing 10 per cent commissions on each individual contract) (Lazarus,
2005: 19, 23; Holt, 1979: 135, 138; Bielby and Bielby, 1999: 67; Acheson
and Maule, 2005: 326). Clearly, it is only a handful of the largest agencies
– such as William Morris, CAA and ICM – that have the industry reach
and extensive client lists necessary to construct such deals (Lazarus, 2005:
18). The existence of packaging tactics does suggest that the traditionally
isolated figure of the screenwriter may have found ways to counteract the
formerly marginalising power of the studio boss and the auteur director.
Yet on reflection, the contemporary cross-sectoral talent agency may itself
be coming to constitute a new form of studio system, able to parcel up the
various talents at its disposal into teams of adaptation-ready creative
personnel. In such a situation, an agent risks potential conflict of interest
in including not necessarily the screenwriter best suited for a project, but
one who is compatible with and agreeable to the other (major) acting and
directing talent they seek to attach to a film (Holt, 1979: 138; Lazarus,
2005: 25). Similarly, studios or production companies tempted by a
package that includes bankable A-list stars may settle for a suboptimal
screenwriter component in order not to jeopardise the larger talent
package on offer – potentially to the detriment of the adaptation project.
Nevertheless, in the Bourdieusian conception of creative production as a
stock exchange of competing interests, it is the traditionally most finan-
cially precarious and institutionally marginalised figures of the author
and screenwriter who appear to have found a means to consolidate their
bargaining positions. Now not only do such figures hire individual,
commission-based agents, but agents have themselves consolidated into
multinational corporate powerhouses. The traditional adaptation indus-
try strongholds of publishers on one hand and film studios on the other
have thus well and truly been put on notice that adaptation is no longer
a process of simple negotiation between discrete book and film industries.
Rather, it has become a process of tactical, project-based alliances across
the adaptation industry as a whole.

The Screenwriter within the Adaptation Industry:

‘An Intermediary, Crossing and Re-crossing the Border
between . . . Two Forms’5
The adapted screenplay can, of course, arise from a multiplicity of media,
not only prose fiction. Nominees for the Academy Award category now
termed ‘writing (adapted screenplay)’ have, over the past decade, included
works adapted from comic strips/graphic novels, stage plays, musicals,
biographies and real-life events.6 Perhaps it is only a matter of time before
a work adapted from a computer game is nominated. However, the
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 143
present discussion analyses screenplays adapted from print sources and,
more specifically, print sources which might loosely self-describe as
‘literary’. This choice represents more than simple blind adherence to
adaptation studies’ long-held preference for high-cultural source material;
the fact remains that a significant proportion of adapted screenplays still
derive from esteemed literary properties and an analysis that aims to map
in some detail the industrial workings of the adaptation economy cannot
hope to chart the workings of the entire adaptation process between the
full gamut of media industries. For the sake of analytical precision, a
boundary has to be drawn around the material at some point. Moreover,
self-proclaimedly ‘literary adaptations’ offer a particularly fascinating
glimpse at how the high-cultural aspirations of aesthetically praised
materials coexist with the economic imperatives of the adaptation
industry’s various components. The process by which great art and great
commercial rewards coexist, and the terms on which they do so, are ever-
more intriguing ones for the cultural sociologist.
When a literary property is optioned and then sold for screen adap-
tation, typically there is no extant screenplay (unless the book’s author
has pursued the tactic of twin-track authorship outlined in Chapter 1, in
which case producers must both purchase the screenplay and option the
original novel). It is thus open to producers to hire authors to adapt their
own work for the screen. This has the advantage of mobilising the
author’s deep knowledge of the source material and of forestalling poten-
tial reader objections about alleged ‘betrayal’ of a beloved literary novel;
as Julien Thuan of the United Talent Agency observes, ‘It becomes very
tricky when you factor in a well-known book. You have high expecta-
tions, what the fan base wants’ (Cirile, 2006: 42). However, the fact that
authors hired to script screenplays of their own work frequently only
undertake initial drafts before the material is passed to a dedicated screen-
writer, or that authors are hired as co-screenwriters alongside screen-
industry professionals, highlights that authors’ very closeness to the
material can inhibit their reimagining the narrative for the distinctive
aesthetic vocabulary of the screen. For the novelist accustomed to writing
day-to-day in near-total isolation, the inherently collaborative nature of
feature film-making can be a shock and even a creative affront (Lazarus,
2005: 69, 72).7
More typically, then, the scriptwriter adapting a property for the screen
will be a writer other than the work’s original author. Anyone familiar
with the journalistic subgenre of interviews with authors and screen-
writers which appear regularly upon the release of a film adaptation will
have noted in this regard the particularly charged vocabulary with which
practitioners discuss the act of adaptation: ‘fear’; ‘torture’; ‘responsi-
bility’; ‘respect’; ‘reverence’; ‘courage’; ‘brave[ry]’; ‘disrespect’. 8 We could
trace a hypothetical continuum here between two extremes of the screen-
writerly experience – the ‘overwhelmed’ screenwriter, awestruck by the
144 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
literary genius of the author, and the ‘ruthless’ screenwriter cutting and
slashing mercilessly to rework the material for a different medium.9 It
would be possible, were we so inclined, to comb interviews with screen-
writers and adapted authors and to range their various comments across
such a continuum in relation to these two poles of response. For example,
Brian Helgeland, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who jointly adapted
James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential (1997) with director Curtis Hanson,
talks of his self-abasement in the face of Ellroy’s authorial genius:10

when it [the script] was done, my overriding fear was that he

wouldn’t like it, in which case it would all have been a waste. All of
it. Even if the movie came out and did well, it wouldn’t matter. But
it got sent to him, and he read it and liked it and signed off on it. . . .
The high point of the whole experience was that James Ellroy didn’t
think I had messed it up.
(Tarantino and Helgeland, 2003: 83)

(It is worth noting, in this line, that where the adapted literary property
is non-fiction, such as Mariane Pearl’s memoir of her husband Daniel
Pearl’s kidnapping and murder by Islamic terrorists, the screenwriter’s
sense of responsibility to both the material and its author is amplified
many times over; screenwriter of A Mighty Heart (2007) John Orloff
states ‘as a writer, I had this incredible – I think everyone who had
anything to do with the film – had this incredible onus and responsibility
to get it right, and to make her feel that we got it right’ (Lemire, 2008).)
For the screenwriter of fictional material who is prone to Kaufmanesque
bouts of creatorly inferiority and low literary self-esteem, it unsurprisingly
helps, as Australian film producer Margaret Fink has dryly noted, ‘if the
author is dead’ (Wyndham, 2005a: 8).
Closer to the ‘ruthless’ pole of the continuum, however, exist screen-
writers who understand reworking material as necessary to ensure a suc-
cessful transfer to the screen. Ian McEwan, writing about adapting
Timothy Mo’s novel Sour Sweet (1982) for film, compares himself to a
‘hooligan builder’, knocking through walls and generally trashing the
beautifully appointed and decorated nineteenth-century mansion of Mo’s
novelistic prose (1988: v). Interestingly in the context of the structural
changes to the book industry over the last few decades outlined in
Chapter 2, screenwriter Stephen Schiff understands the adapted screen-
play’s radical pruning and reshaping of a work as a contemporary echo
of the creative mentoring formerly undertaken by the Maxwell Perkins
model of book editors:

Sometimes we screenwriters feel as if we are doing the stuff the

legendary book editors once did – analyzing a novel and saying, albeit
to ourselves: ‘No, this character wouldn’t do that; let’s omit it. No,
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 145
that’s a fruitless tangent; don’t go there. No, that minor character has
the same function as that other minor character; why not combine
them?’ Except that we have a freedom today’s frustrated editors can
only fantasize about: we seize the book from its author and reinvent
it to suit ourselves.
(Schiff, 2002)

A leitmotif of adapted screenwriters’ comments about their work is the

paradoxical concept of having to destroy a work in order to realise a
successful adaptation – of playing fast and loose with the source text in
order to capture its unique, valued essence. As UK author and screen-
writer Deborah Moggach writes of adapting iconic texts Pride and
Prejudice and The Dairy of Anne Frank for film and television respec-
tively, ‘Adaptation is a ruthless process – you have to dismember the book
and reassemble it, so it must be approached with huge love and integrity.
But when it’s done well, it is an act of creativity between everyone
involved’ (Merritt, 2008: 3).
Adaptation studies – in both its traditional form and even in its more
recent ‘new-wave’ manifestations – is replete with such paradoxical and
quasi-metaphysical speculations on the nature of artistic properties. In
keeping with the present volume’s commitment to rethinking adaptation
along economic lines, it is worth asking what industrial realities undergird
these oxymoronic protestations of loyal disloyalty and which might
prompt their constant reiteration. Viewed industrially, the most striking
element of the adapted screenwriter’s professional life is the degree of
structural exposure it involves at the interface of the print and screen
industries. On one hand, screenwriters predominantly work in isolation
and on a freelance basis, in marked contrast to other elements in the
adaptation economy, such as publishers, producers and distributors,
whose working life is typically more bureaucratised and hierarchically
structured. The domestically located, self-reliant and frequently freelanc-
ing screenwriter would appear, therefore, to have most in common with
the literary author amongst the various adaptation industry agents traced
by this study. However, the screenwriter must endure all the creative
isolation experienced by the literary author without the concomitant pay-
offs of a Romanticised rhetorical self-rationale, control over copyright in
their creation, or even robustly defensible moral rights to attribution and
the integrity of their creative work (Maras, 1999; Rimmer, 2001). In this
sense, the role of the adaptive screenwriter is inherently liminal – even
flagrantly contradictory – straddling a bewildering number of structural
divides. Industrially, the screenwriter is both isolated as well as clearly
subordinated to film industry legal and financial controls. Creatively,
the screenwriter is charged with reworking often esteemed literary proper-
ties into the radically different aesthetic vocabularies of screen media.
Philosophically, the screenwriter is obliged to create a technically original
146 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
piece of work without any of the cultural kudos a widely internalised
Romantic aesthetic reserves for the ‘true’ creativity of the literary author.
Is it any wonder then that Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay of an adaptive
screenwriter plunged into a morass of existential anxiety proved such a
hit on the awards circuit amongst screenwriters themselves?11 As UK
screenwriter Joe Penhall, adapter of celebrated literary works such as Ian
McEwan’s Enduring Love and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, observes
lugubriously: ‘whatever goes wrong, it’s always the writer’s fault’
(Lindrea, 2004).
The most recent, genuinely innovative wave of work in adaptation
studies has shrugged off cultural criticism’s former thrall to the idea of
original genius, a paradigm which had functioned to ensure adaptation
studies’ intellectually marginalised status. Instead, postmodern-influenced
adaptation scholars such as Linda Hutcheon rationalise audiences’ evi-
dently unslaked appetite for adaptations via a ‘same-but-different’ logic:
namely, that audiences derive pleasure from seeing familiar cultural
properties reimagined in other media or in the same medium utilising
different genres (Hutcheon, 2006: 4). Be that as it may, such arguments
fail to account convincingly for the economic dimensions of the adapta-
tion industry or to explain its products’ relationship to broader institu-
tional and professional patterns. Approaching adaptation sociologically
provides such alternative insights. Each adaptation into a new medium
must, after all, succeed artistically, critically and financially on its own
merits, and will be lambasted if it fails to do so. But, at the same time,
each manifestation of an adapted property must build prestige for the
overarching content brand – contributing to its cultural and commercial
overheads, as it were. This is because the screen industries have an
economic interest in ensuring the valuable brand of a much-loved and
prize-winning book is seen to be enhanced – or at a minimum not debased
– by its reimagining in a different medium. Conversely, the book indus-
tries have a substantial interest in the success of screen adaptations
through beneficial publicity for tie-in editions, making-of books and
possible novelisations. The sector of the adaptation industry focussed on
literary adaptations constantly walks this fine line between cultivating the
prestigious associations of critically celebrated and often prize-winning
properties, while simultaneously ensuring that their screen adaptation
secures vastly more in box-office returns and subsequent media sell-
through than even a bestselling book was likely to have achieved. It is, in
short, a highly risky commercial exercise which can never be too explicit
about its own commercial imperatives for fear of debasing the cultural
esteem on which the entire enterprise is built. A rare, phenomenal cross-
format success such as The English Patient delights author, agent, pub-
lisher, critics, director/screenwriter, producers and distributors, building
business for each of these nodal agents through massive cross-promotion
and tie-in products. But each beneficiary must respect that the value of the
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 147
property from which they collectively benefit can never be conceived
principally in economic terms. Bourdieu was correct in his understanding
that two competing – even inverse – logics are here at work. But his
diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive spheres of restricted and
mass production fail adequately to explain how cultural esteem has itself
morphed into such big business.

‘Star’ Literary Adapters

The contemporary Anglophone screen industries have witnessed the
emergence of the ‘star’ literary adapter: a screenwriter whose name func-
tions as guarantor of adaptive fidelity and cultural quality. This is, of
course, an inherently paradoxical permutation of celebrity culture, as not
only is adaptation typically held to be a largely derivative endeavour, but
so too is the screenplay traditionally regarded as a sub-literary form, at
best a disposable necessity of screen production.12 As screenplay theorist
Steven Price encapsulates the conventional view, ‘The screenplay adapted
from the literary work can thereby seem doubly inferior, being both
derivative and (usually) translated into a form that carries less literary
value than the source story’ (2010: 54). Despite the aesthetic and onto-
logical improbability of the ‘star’ literary adapter category, a handful of
screenwriters stand out as having attained such status: British screen-
writer Andrew Davies; the Anglo-German, Indian-by-marriage and now
New York City-resident Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; and Australian adapter
Laura Jones. Andrew Davies – dubbed ‘the adaptation maestro’ – is most
readily associated with high-rating adaptations of Austen and Dickens
classic novels for BBC/Masterpiece Theater miniseries (Lewis, 2006).
Davies has, however, also adapted contemporary literary novels such as
Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (2002) and Affinity (2008), as well as
popular fiction bestsellers such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Circle of
Friends (1995) and the House of Cards trilogy (1990; 1993; 1995). Such
is Davies’ brand-name recognition and industry standing that he is now
able to initiate adaptation projects with major production houses: Davies
has spoken of being so impressed by Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-
winning novel The Line of Beauty (2004), that he raved about it to his
agent, receiving the reply ‘well, you’d better adapt it, hadn’t you!’
(Howard, 2006). As adaptation scholar Deborah Cartmell stated in an
interview with Davies, ‘You’re unique in that you’re known as an
adaptor. You’ve actually created a whole niche’ (Cartmell and Whelehan,
2007b: 242). Underlining Davies’ considerable industry sway, the screen-
writer now moreover enjoys a right of first refusal on UK television
adaptations – an extraordinary industry anomaly and, in his own self-
deprecating phrasing, ‘a delightful position to be in’ (Cartmell and
Whelehan, 2007b: 242). It is interesting to speculate whether Davies’
rise to celebrity adapter status has been facilitated by television’s
148 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
Table 5.1 Andrew Davies’s adapted film and television screenplays

Andrew Davies (1936– )

2008 Little Dorrit (TV miniseries) 2001 The Way We Live Now (TV
miniseries)
2008 Brideshead Revisited
2001 Bridget Jones’s Diary
2008 Affinity
(screenplay)
2008 Sense and Sensibility (TV
2001 The Tailor of Panama
miniseries)
(screenplay)
2007 Fanny Hill (TV series)
2000 Take a Girl Like You (TV
2007 Northanger Abbey (TV movie) movie)
2007 The Diary of a Nobody (TV 1999 Wives and Daughters
movie)
(TV miniseries)
2006 The Line of Beauty (TV
1998 Vanity Fair (TV miniseries)
miniseries)
1996 Emma (TV movie)
2005 Bleak House (TV miniseries)
1996 The Fortunes and Misfortunes
2004 Bridget Jones: The Edge of
of Moll Flanders (TV movie)
Reason (screenplay)
1995 Pride and Prejudice (TV
2002 Daniel Deronda (TV series)
miniseries)
2002 Doctor Zhivago (TV movie)
1995 Circle of Friends (writer)
2002 Tipping the Velvet (TV series)
1994 Middlemarch (TV miniseries)
2001 Othello (TV movie)
1993 To Play the King (TV series)
1990 House of Cards (TV series)

Table 5.2 Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adapted screenplays

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927– )

2009 The City of Your Final 1990 Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (screenplay)
Destination (screenplay)
1988 Madame Sousatzka (screenplay)
2003 Le divorce (screenplay)
1985 A Room with a View
2000 The Golden Bowl (screenplay) (screenplay)
1998 A Soldier’s Daughter Never 1984 The Bostonians (screenplay)
Cries (screenplay)
1983 Heat and Dust
1993 The Remains of the Day (novel/screenplay)
(screenplay)
1981 Quartet (screenplay)
1992 Howards End (screenplay)
1979 The Europeans (screenplay)
1963 The Householder
(novel/screenplay)
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 149
characteristic absence of auteur directors, permitting the screenwriter to
achieve greater prominence than in the film industry almost by default.13
By contrast, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is recognisable as one of the long-
running Merchant Ivory film-making trio famed for high-fidelity film
adaptations of E.M. Forster and Henry James novels – an acknowledged
master at ‘adapting literary works to the screen with integrity and a
respect for tradition’ (Jhabvala, 2006: 133). Yet, Jhabvala has also
adapted contemporary Booker Prize-winning novels such as The Remains
of the Day (1993) and her own early book, Heat and Dust (1983). For
Jhabvala, established prize-winning literary cachet transfers, as though by
cultural osmosis, to her adapted screenplays, carrying over ‘some of the
“symbolic capital” [s]he has accumulated in the high-prestige cultural
area of established “art” into a cultural sphere that is as yet less widely
acknowledged’ (Korte and Schneider, 2000: 93). Laura Jones, probably
the least well known of the three, works almost exclusively on screen
adaptations of contemporary literary novels and memoirs including An
Angel at My Table (1990), Oscar and Lucinda (1997), Angela’s Ashes
(1999) and Brick Lane (2007). Jones’ strong commitment to collabora-
tive working with female directors, notably Jane Campion and Gillian
Armstrong, has tended perhaps to overshadow public recognition of her
own incipiently auteurish status and to confine her recognition more
within industry circles (Barber, 1996; Thorp, 1997; McCreadie, 2006:
80). Additional names could perhaps be nominated for the category of
‘star literary adapter’, such as Ronald Harwood (Academy Award winner
for his adapted screenplay The Pianist (2002))14, along with Harold Pinter
and David Hare. Yet in these last two cases, screenwriterly activity has
tended to serve as a second string to the careers of prolific dramatists
better known for their groundbreaking stage work (Korte and Schneider,
2000: 99).
Significantly, ‘star’ literary adapters are distinguished from the general
herd by having reconciled the poles of the overawed or ruthless screen-
writer between which lesser-known writers tend to vacillate. This is, of
course, in part a result of the strings of critically and commercially
successful adapted scripts to their individual credit. Each is shielded from

Table 5.3 Laura Jones’s adapted screenplays

Laura Jones (1951– )

2007 Brick Lane (writer) 1997 A Thousand Acres (screenplay)

2002 Possession (screenplay) 1997 The Well (writer)
1999 Angela’s Ashes (screenplay) 1996 The Portrait of a Lady
(screenplay)
1997 Oscar and Lucinda
(screenplay) 1990 An Angel at My Table (writer)
150 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
artistic intimidation by famous living writers they adapt by their own
industry standing (or because they are themselves, in Jhabvala’s case, a
Booker Prize winner). Conversely, star adapters are empowered to prune
a novel for adaptation as ruthlessly as necessary without raising the
trepidation or ire of living novelists because of their established reputation
for lovingly faithful and literary-minded scripts. Freely undertaking the
major changes that all adapters must make, they nevertheless preserve an
air of pervasive ‘literariness’ in their adaptations, thus largely satisfying
both the literary and filmic worlds which they straddle. Actual fidelity to
the source material is beside the point here; Andrew Davies himself freely
admits to hacking and slashing in order to reimagine a novel dramatically
for the screen (Bunbury, 2008). More compelling for current purposes is
the manner in which the ascribed ‘fidelity’ of the star literary adapter
functions industrially: serving as a badge which enables in fact radically
altered screenplays to circulate unproblematically amongst producers and
audiences, allaying fears of disrespect or travestying screen treatment
through the shibboleth of the auteur adapter’s name.
Discernible here might almost be a fulfilment of Richard Corliss’s wish,
back in 1975, for the emergence of the ‘screenwriter as auteur’ (xxii). Star
literary adapters appear to have beaten all the odds: against the long
tradition of disparaging screenwriters as the lowliest on the Hollywood
food chain, and the further obloquy heaped upon the writer of ‘mere’
adapted screenplays, they have been able to carve out careers as significant
professionals within the creative industries. Yet the name recognition of
Davies, Jhabvala and Jones pales in comparison with that of Hollywood
screenwriter Charlie Kaufman – the only screenwriter to rate an entry in
Premiere magazine’s Hollywood ‘Power 100’ listing.15 The elusive screen-
writerly holy grail of the possessory credit – ‘a Charlie Kaufman film’ – has
not yet been officially bestowed upon films derived from Kaufman’s
screenplays, but the adjective ‘Kaufmanesque’ is routinely employed in
screen trade journals to describe a certain kind of mind-bending, narra-
tively self-conscious cinematic jeu d’esprit (Cousins, 2004). Kaufman’s
anomalously auteurish signature moreover persists despite the fact that the
majority of his screenplays have been directed by others (Spike Jonze,
Michel Gondry, George Clooney) (Phipps and Tobias, 2006; Arnett,
2007). Perhaps the most resonant (and characteristically self-referential)
evidence for Kaufman’s apotheosis as screenwriter–auteur comes from
screenwriting guru Robert McKee: ‘he’s stepped out of screenwriting
anonymity to gain national recognition as an artist’ (Kaufman and
Kaufman, 2002: 131; see also King, 2009: 47). The implications of such
an (admittedly tiny) group of screenwriters wielding significant industry
leverage are as yet unclear. Potentially, the rise of the auteur screenwriter
– especially of adapted literary works – promises to turn screenwriters’
typically intermedial and liminal industry positioning into a strength,
enabling maximum manoeuvrability and cross-sectoral strategic alliances
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 151
in the fluid domain of post-Fordist, rapidly converging creative industries.
In this sense, the Academy Award-winning Kaufman’s seemingly self-
deprecating confession that ‘I’m more of a book guy than a movie guy’
might be read as harbouring a secondary meaning.

Script as Blueprint/Script as Artefact

As alluded to throughout this discussion, the received view of film scripts
has long been that they constitute mere blueprints for the creative achieve-
ment of the finished screen work (Kohn, 1999; Maras, 1999; Korte and
Schneider, 2000; Macdonald, 2004; Nelmes, 2007; Boozer, 2008). To
cite again Richard Corliss’s lament at the pervasive denigration of screen-
writers: ‘screenplays are rarely published (and barely consulted even
then), while the films made from them are available at the flick of a TV
channel selector’ (1975: xx).16 While largely true in 1975, this idea of the
script as mere workmanlike preparation for the ‘real’ creativity of the
achieved film has undergone a radical transformation, with scripts today
increasingly esteemed as cultural artefacts in their own right (Maras,
2009: 4–5). This meteoric shift in the cultural status of the screenplay may
be traced to several factors: the rise of academic film studies and the
general cultural recognition of film-making as an art form; the institu-
tionalisation of screenwriting courses within film schools and creative
writing programmes resulting in a need for ‘settable’ canonical texts; and
academic publishers’ targeting, since the 1980s, of the booming film–
media–cultural studies market, especially for undergraduate textbooks
(Boozer, 2008: 29; Price, 2010: 94–95).
The script’s new guise as cultural artefact in its own right is dramati-
cally illustrated by the growth of script-collecting and script-trading fora
on the Internet. General auction site eBay competes with dedicated sites
such as SimplyScripts,17 Script-o-rama,18 and ScriptShack19 in offering for
public sale a huge range of script copies for notable films and television
series, including those presently on release or in their current season.
Admittedly scripts for cult films predominate, and the value of scripts
does appear to be greatly enhanced by being autographed by star actors
and/or directors, suggesting the typical script collector seeks a second-
hand dose of star allure though owning items of celebrity memorabilia
(McGurk, 2008). But the collectable script phenomenon cannot simply be
attributed to such an object-driven view of the script as celebrity-touched
commodity; creative achievement in the screenplay’s content is also
clearly of import to script traders, as evidenced by demand for draft
scripts of produced works, as well as for unproduced scripts. Given that
scripts falling into either category cannot be considered direct blueprints
for any realised work, demonstrated demand for such scripts must be
attributed to valorisation of the art of screenwriting itself – an interest in
the structural and wordsmith skill evident in the script qua creative work.
152 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
In the screen industries, copyright in scripts is almost invariably held by
the studio – a point prominently flagged to script readers though stern
infringement notices. As a result, online script traders’ admiration for the
creative achievements of screenwriters exists very much in an intellectual
property grey area (McGurk, 2008).
The final and most ubiquitous evidence for the script’s elevated status as
cultural document is the phenomenon of the published screenplay.
Screenplays are now occasionally ‘published’ on DVD as part of extras
packages, but the more familiar form of publication is via the medium of
the book (Auerbach, 2006: 96; Boozer, 2008: 18; Price, 2010: 95). Several
publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have built lists dedicated to
publishing ‘shooting scripts’, namely Faber & Faber, Ebury, and Nick
Hern Books in the UK, and Newmarket Press in the US. Such houses pur-
chase the screenplay publishing rights to promising properties prior to a
film entering production in order to accommodate the long publishing and
retailing lead times required by the book industry (Quinn, 1996: 23; Korte
and Schneider, 2000: 92). In an attempt to offset some of the risk this
represents, screenplay publishers will often contractually stipulate a right
to license the film’s artwork, poster designs and logos to ensure maximum
consumer recognition of the screenplay’s relationship to the broader
product franchise. The above imprints tend to publish original screenplays
of broadly ‘alternative’ or auteurist film-makers as freestanding entities
but, depending upon the availability of rights, there is also the possibility
of publishing adapted screenplays bound in with the source novel or short
story in an omnibus edition. Such ‘companion titles’ can additionally
bundle Introductions by the screenwriter/s and directors reflecting upon
their work, interviews with the original author and various production
stills, costume designs and location-scouting notes, as do the companion
volumes for films Brokeback Mountain (2006) and Sweeney Todd: The
Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Salisbury, 2007) (Turney, 2007: 26). Where
the film studio concerned is part of a multimedia conglomerate, typically
the affiliate book division will gain first-look rights to produce such a book
tie-in, a manifestation of what adaptation scholar Jan Baetens terms
contemporary cinema’s embedding in ‘a complex set of intermedial hybrid
structures’ (2007: 227). However, even the best laid plans of corporate
synergy may be thrown over for a higher rights bid from an outside pub-
lishing house, or because of the difficulties inherent in coordinating in-
house release dates between various media sectors and across multiple
territories (Quinn, 1999).
A related bookish incarnation of the screen text is the ‘novelisation’ –
commonly a prose reworking of a produced screenplay, written quickly
on commission and issued to cross-promote a screen release. Novelisation
has typically occupied the very lowest rung on the literary ladder (Holt,
1979: 137; Baetens, 2005: 47; Van Parys, 2009: 314). Woody Allen’s
television screenwriter character in Manhattan (1979) sums up the
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 153
received view, shoring up his fragile creative self-esteem by heaping
obloquy on a fellow character’s hackwork film novelisation. While it is
true that genre fiction such as science fiction (SF), fantasy, horror and
adventure titles dominated the genre from the 1970s (accompanied more
recently by narratives set in computer-game worlds), the novelisation in
fact traces its origins to the earliest decades of Continental cinema in the
form of the ciné-roman (a book of silent-movie stills with lengthy textual
captions or a loosely threaded narrative) (Baetens and Lits, 2004; Baetens,
2005: 48–49; 2007: 228–29, 233). Baetens also discerns ‘elite mani-
festations’ of the genre, as evident in novelisations of art films (2005: 54).
This publishing feat, though rare, has been achieved twice by celebrated
Australian screenwriter–director Jane Campion in novelisations of her co-
written scripts for The Piano (1993; 1994) and its follow-up, Holy Smoke
(1999; 1999) (Gelder, 1999). While The Piano was in fact an original
screenplay, Campion’s film employed many of the textual signifiers of the
nineteenth-century classic novel adaptation; this, plus its Palme d’Or
plaudits, made subsequent publication of an up-market novelisation
commercially feasible (Campion and Pullinger, 1994).
In circumstances where a novelisation and original novel coexist,
marketing relationships between publisher and producer become more
complex, because of the risk of novelisation sales cannibalising sales of
the source novel. For this reason, publishing rights directors have long
advocated withholding novelisation rights from screen rights contracts to
prevent simultaneous appearance of competing products (‘So’, 1982).
Additionally, publishers aim for contractual terms stipulating their right
to incorporate film art and movie stills in a tie-in-edition cover design, so
as to prioritise the novel over any novelisation in the mind of casual
bookshop browsers – or at a minimum to bedeck the tie-in edition of the
novel with equally filmic appeal (Holt, 1979: 136; ‘So’, 1982: 6; Baetens,
2005: 56; Richardson, 2008: 22; Raftos, 2008; McColl, 2009). What
these various jockeyings for position amongst media sectors illustrate is
that the published screenplay, novelisation, companion volume, ‘making-
of’ book and tie-in edition are not sharply distinguished creative entities
in the public mind but rather take up their place on a continuum of book–
screen hybrids.20 As such, they do not constitute stand-alone properties,
so much as affiliated, varied incarnations of an overarching content
brand.

Conclusion
So what should we ultimately make of this strange hybrid phenome-
non, the published screenplay? As has been mentioned, recent scholars of
screenwriting lament that the script has typically represented the for-
gotten intertext between the (often esteemed) novel and the (more widely
known) screen adaptation (Nelmes, 2007: 107; Boozer, 2008: 2). Against
154 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter
this doleful background, surely the published screenplay constitutes
belated recognition of screenwriters’ creative contribution and industrial
significance? A glance at Newmarket Press’s edition of Christopher
Hampton’s screenplay for Atonement (2007), issued as part of their
‘Shooting Script’ series, should give screenwriting supporters keen to
close the door on the ‘bad old days’ some pause. On one hand the book
is handsomely packaged, bedecked with cover stills of the film’s stars
and opens with an Introduction by the screenwriter himself, putting
Hampton’s stamp on the creative handiwork within front and centre in
the reader’s mind rather than having it eclipsed by the reputation of Ian
McEwan’s critically praised and bestselling novel. However, the reader of
Hampton’s Introduction encounters this caveat in the final paragraph:

What you have in your hands is a transcription, made after the event,
of the finished film. The dozens of scenes that fell by the wayside like
exhausted soldiers on their way to Dunkirk had their place in the
overall scheme of things, but to include any or all of them might seem
like a criticism of the completed object: the film Atonement, of which
this is the written record.
(2007: viii)

Contrary to the title of the publisher’s series, the published screenplay

of Atonement is not in fact a ‘shooting script’, but an ex-post-facto
transcription of the released film presented with the characteristic font,
layout and stylistic vocabulary of a screenplay. Whereas the script-trading
enthusiast or student of screenwriting might come to this text hoping for
glimpses of the film not made (such as earlier drafts, deleted scenes,
excised subplots), Hampton’s Introduction makes clear that nothing
so troublingly intertextual or evidently provisional is being presented.
Perhaps Hampton had become inured to this scheme of things through
his experience of publishing his earlier screenplay to the film Carrington
(1995). Hampton’s foreword to Faber’s edition of Carrington observes
that the screenplay went through ‘a minimum of eight or nine drafts’
during the 18 years of the project’s gestation, and that the final cuts
‘were made, painfully, after completion of the film’. He adds that ‘it
seemed right, however, to print here a text as close to the finished film as
might be; and this is what will be found in the following pages’ (1995:
np; cf. Korte and Schneider, 2000: 95). Given that Hampton was also
Carrington’s director, this insistence on a ‘mnemonic’ screenplay version
can only have been made by the book’s publisher, and says much about
their conception of the readership for published screenplays (Price, 2010:
106).21 As screenplay theorist Steven Price observes of screenplays in their
published version, these artefacts are in truth ‘not screenplays in any
accepted sense of the term’ (2010: 106).22 That even a writer as celebrated
as Christopher Hampton (both as an original stage dramatist and as
 The Intermedial Figure of the Screenwriter 155
an emergent ‘star’ literary adapter for screen) had his contribution to
Atonement so subordinated to the achievement of the then relative
neophyte director Joe Wright is telling. More broadly, Hampton’s squea-
mishness lest inclusion of Atonement’s deleted scenes appear ‘a criticism
of the completed object’ underlines the workmanlike, embryonic screen-
play’s lingering subordination to the masterwork of the ‘finished’ film.
The inherently contradictory object that is the published screenplay
thus suggests that, for the contemporary adapted screenwriter, it is a case
of two steps forward and one step back. The very document that would
appear on its surface to signal long-awaited valorisation of screenwriters’
artistic contribution functions, upon closer examination, to sideline it
once again in favour of the famous novelist on one hand and auteurist
director on the other. Such paradoxical texts indicate that the intermedial
role of the screenwriter is still marooned between hierarchically oriented
and industry-specific powerbases within the book and screen industries.
In such an environment it will be up to screenwriters, their representative
lobby groups and possibly also their agents (with all their potentially
divided loyalties) to militate for increased profile, creative recognition and
economic bargaining power in the converged, trans-sectoral adaptation
industry that is emerging. Having been for so long literally and meta-
phorically banished from the soundstage of adaptation, it is incumbent
upon screenwriters to seize this moment of industrial realignment and to
attempt to restructure the cultural field to their professional advantage.
6 Cultivating the Reader
Producer and Distributor
Strategies for Converting
Readers into Audiences

The Reader has a fanatical audience. The people who love The Reader
love it. What you win on, in the first round of nominations, is passion, the
people who vote No. 1 for your film.
(Harvey Weinstein, quoted in Sctoodeh, 2009: 60)

Classy package will appeal to upscale specialized auds and the bookish set.
(Variety review of The Reader: McCarthy, 2008)

For traditional adaptation studies, it has long been both a point of

principle as well as a fact easily verifiable from countless reviews and
cinema-foyer conversations that fans of a particular book will not neces-
sarily approve of a screen adaptation of the work. For the fledgling adap-
tation discipline such a state of affairs presented a stumbling block to the
discipline’s own self-conception – if, after all, the book was always better,
why study adaptations at all? Seeking to justify the respectability of its
interest in cinema (and later television) adaptations, the discipline of
adaptation studies attempted to balance claims for the fitness of the
subject for academic research with scholars’ own primary loyalty to litera-
ture by virtue of their academic training and internalised (and often
unrationalised) logophilia. Hence, a common argumentative trajectory
emerged in much adaptation studies work which isolated the particular
literary text (commonly a canonical novel) for study, and then minutely
analysed one or more screen adaptations of it, in effect allowing the screen
text a limited aesthetic validity, before the predictable closing gesture of
reiterating the book’s superior cultural plaudits. Screen texts were thus
accorded sufficient creative achievement to justify the existence of adap-
tation studies itself, but not such credence that the dominant position of
literary studies in humanities departments came under threat from a rival,
self-validating paradigm such as film studies. It is no wonder that film
aficionados fumed at criteria of cultural appraisal that simultaneously
sought to appropriate the popular profile and student enrolments asso-
ciated with cinema while evermore disparaging the art form with faint
and qualified praise.
 Cultivating the Reader 157
Subsequent waves of adaptation studies emerging since the 1970s set
about demolishing with gusto such chestnuts of audience denigration of
films adapted from much-loved literary works, rightly pointing out how
such judgements commonly function as displays of individuals’ cultural
capital and reinforce inherited hierarchies of media formats. These later
scholars have had little truck with audience members’ complaints of lack
of fidelity in changes in narrative, or of protests that the reader’s sub-
jective portrait of the characters does not gel with the casting decisions of
directors and producers. Yet, for all new-wave adaptation studies’ impa-
tience with audiences’ often unreflectingly pejorative judgements on
screen adaptations, such scholars precisely replicate traditional adapta-
tion studies in a key underlying assumption: that readers of a book are
easily and unproblematically convertible into screen audiences. The
assumed fungibility of the reader into the cinema-goer typically rests on
the conception of a bestselling novel as a ‘pre-sold’ property – an already
established cultural brand-name the demonstrated success of which in one
medium looks likely to attract consumers in other media (Wyatt, 1994:
4, 15, 78; 1998a: 78; Austin, 2002: 114, 117; see also Maltby, 1995: 76;
Wasko, 2003: 55; Edwards, 2006: 34, 45). Without question, this is key
to the appeal of bestselling books and authors in the eyes of the screen
industries; the established market profile of a particular narrative obviates
the need for market research about the story’s attractiveness, thus
heartening financiers, facilitating green-lighting and allowing marketing
departments a rough idea of target demographics for the resultant adap-
tation.1 However, new-wave adaptations scholars, like their traditional
counterparts, fatally overvalue bestselling works’ pre-sold nature, naively
assuming the property’s almost talismanic cultural power is in itself
sufficient to lure readers (or those who’ve merely heard of the text) into
cinemas. In fact, even a cursory glance at the contemporary film industry
registers the existence of a whole marketing and publicity apparatus
employing many thousands dedicated to the task of creating film audi-
ences – most definitely including for adaptations. Clearly, factors beyond
the text and its reputational aura here come decisively into play.
Film marketers’ chief tasks consist of creating buzz about a film
property, converting public awareness into the all-important ‘want-to-see’
factor, and then delivering sufficient numbers of well-disposed audience-
members’ posteriors to grace cinema seats. Sufficient audience numbers
for the cinema release set up the film property’s subsequent sell-through
in other exhibition windows such as DVD, pay-per-view, cable television,
first-run free-to-air broadcast, and eventual syndication. Intriguingly, and
despite the received wisdom that fans of a book are predisposed to be
hyper-critical consumers of a screen adaptation, the involvement of the
book world in this process of film marketing is crucial. Long after the
screen rights to a literary property have been acquired, the cinema world
remains intent upon cultivating readers through liaison with book-world
158 Cultivating the Reader
stakeholders. Where a literary adaptation is produced within a major
studio, such marketing-focussed liaison with the book world may begin
at the project’s inception and be fanned throughout production and post-
production phases; the more culturally esteemed the contemporary
literary property, the more intricately coordinated are book- and screen-
world interactions. There is thus no stage in the life of such a literary
adaptation that can be considered quarantined from marketing (Lazarus,
2005: 151, 156). In the case where a literary adaptation is produced by
an independent production company and then subsequently acquired for
distribution by a major studio or its specialty division (the more typical
route for contemporary arthouse literary adaptations), book-world culti-
vation may begin in earnest only at the point of preparing the distribution
strategy. Either way, the market positioning, advertising, release strategy
and awards campaigning for the arthouse literary adaptation commonly
recruit author, publisher, screenwriter, director, stars and literary-award
kudos, all tightly choreographed to construct an early-adopter audience
for the film from amongst the book’s existing readership. This audience
will not in itself be sufficient to ensure the film’s critical or commercial
success but, as will be explored, its imprimatur is the adapted literary
film’s crucial launching pad. The encounter between reader and adapted
film is thus anything but inevitable or serendipitous; Miramax cofounder
Harvey Weinstein, the figure more than any other responsible for
shepherding arthouse literary adaptations to mainstream success over
the preceding 20 years, plainly underlines film marketing’s proactive,
audience-recruiting bent: ‘It’s the distributors’ responsibility to find the
audience’ (quoted in Perren, 2001: 34).
Such a shift from conceiving of the arthouse adaptation audience as
self-constituting, to a proper understanding of that audience as strategi-
cally constructed – actively, consciously, painstakingly – changes the
nature of academic adaptation studies’ project. Paying attention to the
structural, institutional and material contexts in which adaptations circu-
late highlights how individual critical and audience judgements (whether
positive or negative) about an adaptation’s success are crucially inflected
by the context of the textual encounter. Further, such a frame of analysis
makes apparent that the cinema-goer’s or academic analyst’s engagement
with a text in the first place is itself frequently the outcome of elaborately
designed industrial strategies. Film scholar Amy Villarejo writes that
Miramax’s sensationalist publicity campaign for Neil Jordan’s The
Crying Game (1992) ‘alerts us to the importance of weighing how films
circulate in cultural and economic contexts, rather than merely producing
hermetic textual analyses’ (2008: 81). In the contemporary world, a film
is increasingly ‘made’ in terms of its popular perception as much by its
marketing campaign and distribution pattern as it is by the images and
sounds recorded upon its negative. Indeed, if marketing is unsuccessful or
non-existent, those recorded images and sounds may never be experienced
 Cultivating the Reader 159
by an audience beyond the coterie of the film’s creative and technical
personnel. Therefore, in a very real – if counter-intuitive – sense producers
and distributors make film adaptations. Acknowledgement and explora-
tion of their dual – and sometimes combined – roles are the necessary final
analytical step in this study’s charting of the flow of creative content
around adaptation industry circuits.

The Producer’s Role

Paul N. Lazarus III, in his industry handbook Produced by . . .: Balancing
Art and Business in the Movie Industry (2005), laconically summarises
the film producer’s primary responsibility as ‘to get the movie made’ (xiv).
This catch-all job description aptly encapsulates the plethora of financial,
legal and administrative tasks which fall to the producer in the process of
shepherding a film project from abstract concept to cultural and com-
mercial artefact. Given the range of tasks involved, the producer’s role
has, unsurprisingly, fractured into a range of sub-roles of greater or lesser
industry clout. At the top of the film-making hierarchy, the executive
producer oversees acquisition of the adaptable property, organises major
production finance, and coordinates a project’s key creative talent, fre-
quently through packaging deals (in collaboration with prominent agents,
as outlined in Chapter 5) (Wasko, 2003: 24; Bordwell and Thompson,
2004: 24). Often powerful Hollywood players, leading stars or even, in
rare cases, a star literary author, the executive producer’s practical
involvement with the project may effectively cease after the development
and pre-production phases, only making a renewed appearance at the
anticipated awards ceremony. By contrast, the less grandiosely adjecti-
vally endowed producer is likely to be tasked with the more hands-on and
detailed functions of full casting and hire of technical crew, liaison with
a screenwriter/s including oversight of successive screenplay drafts, and
detailed budget and financial breakdowns. Given the role’s essentially
managerial character, the producer might best be described as ‘a creative
administrator . . . a judge of creativity’ (Houghton, quoted in Acheson
and Maule, 2005: 316). Further down the pecking order are a number of
line producers and associate producers whose roles involve devising and
administering location budgets, coordinating shooting schedules and
liaising with film laboratories, technical and logistical personnel. As the
subtle differentiation in job titles suggests, who actually performs which
roles in a given film’s production is in practice subject to a whole eco-
system of situational variables, career investments and competing egos.
For producers working in-house on studio payrolls, liaison with the
book world over an adapted property may begin at the inception of a film
project. In-house producers may extensively cultivate a prominent literary
author and their agent in order to acquire a desirable property on optimal
terms. As the major Hollywood studios comprise subsidiaries within
160 Cultivating the Reader
multimedia conglomerates with interests in a diverse array of communica-
tion formats, studio producers may begin coordinating cross-promotional
activities with book, television, newspaper, magazine and computer-
gaming divisions at early stages of the project’s life. These attempts to
construct the brand franchise for a property, while most intense around
popular fiction and especially children’s properties, occur also with lit-
erary fiction, often taking the form of elaborate websites enticing fans
with production snippets, casting information and interviews with the
author and the film’s key creative personnel. Thus the marketing
approach to a book’s existing readership frequently begins some 18
months or more prior to the start of principal photography and represents
an advance party of the studio’s marketing phalanx, set to allay audience
fears of studio bad faith and to begin the first tom-tom beats of a media
campaign that rises to a crescendo upon the film’s eventual release.
Lacking the cross-sectional support and vast infrastructure provided by
conglomerate backing, independent producers must begin grooming loyal
readerships on a more modest scale. Because independent production
companies working outside of the Hollywood majors typically have more
constrained finances, the deals on offer to an author’s agent may be less
lucrative, but this may be offset by promises of greater producer–author
collaboration, such as hiring the author to draft a screenplay, or liaising
with the author regarding selection of the director and other major
creative talent. For independent producers adapting literary properties,
the existing renown and reader goodwill attached to a strong-selling
and/or critically feted book become even more valuable as forms of free
film publicity. Hence literary-award kudos may be avidly promoted by
independent producers, especially those of an auteurist/arthouse frame of
mind who feel an affinity with the creative risk-taking and more muted
commercial ethos characterising much literary fiction. Kindred spirits
who are located at some remove from the heart of commercial book pub-
lishing and from the Hollywood studio system respectively, the literary
author and the independent producer may collaboratively broker an
insider-outsider aura from their joint project – appealing both to cultural
cognoscenti, but also selling the allure of that cultural refinement to
appropriable subsections of the mainstream film-going audience.
Crucial to such a literary adaptation cross-over strategy is the role of
the distributor. In the traditional film industry supply chain comprising
successive phases of production, distribution and exhibition, real power
has long accrued to distributors because of their indispensible role in
connecting film texts with audiences. Hence distribution has typically
represented the industry’s bottleneck where myriad independent and
studio productions compete for distribution deals with a limited number
of mainstream and specialty distribution companies (Berra, 2008: 162;
Scott, 2009: 164). One effect of such market rivalries has been the emer-
gence of the producer’s representative (also known as a sales agent or
 Cultivating the Reader 161
entertainment attorney). Closely analogous to the broker role played by
literary agents in the relationship between authors (producers) and pub-
lishers (distributors) in their quest to connect with readers (audiences),
producers’ representatives work on a commission basis to bring
completed films to the attention of key distributors via film festivals and
special screenings. The producer’s representative lives or dies commer-
cially by their ability to discern the best distributors for particular unsold
film projects, to negotiate optimal terms of a resultant distribution deal,
and to secure for the producer (and, via commission, for themselves)
maximum payment in an industry notorious for creative accounting and
opaque balance sheets (Lukk, 1997: 138; Lazarus, 2005: 152–53; King,
2009: 102–03; Kerrigan, 2010: 151–55). The rise of the producer’s
representative correlates closely with attempts to bolster producers’
bargaining power in a cultural field strongly tilted against them. Such
professionalisation of intermediary roles between players within the same
media sector (literary agents, producers’ reps), or across media sectors
(scouts), highlights how the flow of content across the adaptation industry
may typically prove mutually beneficial to stakeholders, but that they
remain simultaneously rivals – preoccupied with securing for themselves
favourable terms and maximum commercial outcomes.

The Distributor’s Role

Situated between the glamorised world of film production, and the
banally familiar experience of local cinema-going, the distributor is fre-
quently the industry sector about which the general public is least cog-
nisant. Yet distribution is the locus of real power within the cinema world
for the structural reasons outlined above, and is crucially determining of
which kinds of films receive public attention, to what extent, or whether
they fail do so at all (Moloney, 1999: 47; Acheson and Maule, 2005:
314–15; Wayne, 2006: 63–64; Gomery, 2009: 34). Distributors are
chiefly responsible for the prints and advertising (P&A) dimensions of a
cinema release, including organising and disseminating celluloid film
prints, overseeing creation of film trailers, maintenance of a film’s website,
production of print advertising materials and staging of previews and
press junkets. Essentially, the film distributor creates, manages and
monitors a film’s overall marketing campaign, including the timing and
extent of a feature release and the rate of its expansion. Where a distri-
butor acquires distribution rights to a film across several territories, the
main distributor (frequently US-based) may also coordinate release dates
in other countries. However, producers (and their representatives) may
equally piece together a patchwork of distribution deals for specific terri-
tories much in the same manner that contemporary literary agents fre-
quently parcel up and sell publication rights to demarcated territories
amongst a variety of publishers internationally (see Chapter 2). While
162 Cultivating the Reader
many distributors sign up already completed films from independent
producers, distributors may also commit funding to as-yet-incomplete
projects in return for guaranteed distribution rights to the finished film –
permitting cash-starved independent film-makers sufficient funding to get
the completed negative in the can.
Overwhelmingly dominating global film distribution are the six
Hollywood majors: Fox (a subsidiary of News Corporation), Warner Bros.
Pictures (Time Warner), Universal Pictures (NBC Universal), Paramount
(Viacom), Columbia Pictures (Sony) and Walt Disney Pictures (Disney).
These companies, through their powerful lobbying group the Motion
Picture Association of America (MPAA), maintain a tight oligopoly in
global film which has endured with only moderate changes since the
twentieth century’s opening decades of commercial film production. Prior
to the Paramount Decree of 1948, the Hollywood majors comprised
vertically integrated production–distribution–exhibition behemoths of
formidable market power, able to control all stages in the life of filmed
content. Having long since been forced to divest the theatre chains that had
guaranteed captive audiences for the studios’ output, they now exist
primarily as distribution companies, financing some high-budget in-house
productions but more commonly acting as distributors for films produced
by (semi-)independent producers under contemporary Hollywood’s
package unit system (Miller et al., 2005: 296; Cook, 2007: 54; Bordwell
and Thompson, 2010: 28; see also Chapter 5). Control over distribution
nevertheless guarantees dominant commercial power in contemporary
film: some 95 per cent of box-office receipts generated globally are earned
by the ‘Big 6’ (Pokorny, 2005: 281).
Mainstream commercial film production, while occasionally highly
lucrative, is by its very nature an audience-maximising, risk-reducing
mass-market enterprise and hence shies away from formal or tonal experi-
mentation. For this reason, the much remarked upon rise of so-called
independent film-making during the 1990s, especially in the US, offered
a research and development laboratory for new directorial voices, inno-
vative narrative styles and subject matter previously unpalatable to main-
stream audiences. Rather than being destabilised or threatened by the
growth of the ‘indie’ production and distribution movement, the majors
have, during the course of the 1990s and since, sought to annex ‘inde-
pendent’ film culture through acquisition or creation of specialty distribu-
tion divisions sometimes collectively dubbed ‘Indiewood’ (Hernandez and
Rabinowitz, 1999; King, 2009): Fox Searchlight Pictures (Fox); New Line
Cinema (Warner Bros.); Focus Features (Universal); Paramount Vantage
(Paramount);2 Sony Pictures Classics (Sony); and – until 2010 – Miramax
Films (Disney). Undertaking some in-house production but serving
principally as distribution outfits, the specialist divisions of the majors are
independent in spirit rather than in fact; their managers enjoy relative
autonomy from the parent studio, so long as they remain commercially
 Cultivating the Reader 163
viable in successfully tapping their identified niche markets (Biskind,
2004: 481). The specialist divisions’ core product is boundary-pushing,
moderately experimental or prestige fare, for which they have developed
a reputation and track record in attracting urban, professional, cine-
literate audiences across the English-speaking world. Frequently these film
projects arise from aspirant or marginalised industry figures seeking to
explore less-charted film territory – often quirky, off-beat, character-
driven narratives told in unconventional styles and which stand in marked
contrast to the special effects-laden, predictably plotted and thinly
characterised fare of the Hollywood blockbuster squarely targeting the
multiplex audience. Equally, specialist distributors may deal in prestige
films that are the pet projects of leading Hollywood directors or even
major stars often hoping to pursue greater creative freedom and awards
accolades beyond the restrictive commercial imperatives of tent-pole
studio film-making. Film commentator Edward Jay Epstein quotes an
anonymous Disney executive’s terse summary of the specialty divisions’
creative incubator role, precisely situating them within studios’ broader
corporate strategies:

You can’t get directors of the caliber of Anthony Minghella [Cold

Mountain], Martin Scorsese [Gangs of New York], and Quentin
Tarantino [Kill Bill] to work on movies designed to get kids to buy
toys and drag their parents to theme parks. . . . And these are the
directors who win the Academy Awards.
(2005: 240–41)

The diverse independent film-making sector and the kind of tertiary-

educated, culturally cosmopolitan, frequently affluent audiences it seeks
to attract are clearly a neat demographic fit with the phenomenon of
literary adaptation. It is here that the spheres of literary fiction produc-
tion and credentialising, on one hand, and independent film-making
and distribution, on the other, can be seen to converge most dramatically.
Specialist distributors’ business is structured around the international film
festival circuit that takes in both (originally) non-mainstream festivals
such as Sundance, Telluride3 and Tribeca as well as longer-established A-
list festivals including Venice, Berlin, Cannes and Toronto. The former
serve as key recruiting grounds and talent-spotting opportunities for
distributors to view and sign up promising independent features, while
the latter class of festivals constitute specialist distributors’ preferred
venues for premieres of critic-friendly and award-aspirant films (Lukk,
1997: 120; Levy, 1999: 41; Kerrigan, 2010: 154, 164). As outlined in
Chapter 3’s discussion of the established nexus between Germany’s
annual Berlin Film Festival and the Frankfurt Book Fair, the film festival
circuit is increasingly forging links with other content industries through
themed sidebar events, specialist programmes and targeted prize schemes.
164 Cultivating the Reader
The trend demonstrates a confluence of industry trajectories and marks
out a clear demographic of culturally competent audiences which
specialist film distributors are eager to cater for, especially through screen
adaptations of contemporary literary properties. Promoting Robert
Altman’s adaptation of various Raymond Carver short stories, Short Cuts
(1993), Fine Line Features’ president Ira Deutchman remarked to the
leading US book trade journal Publishers Weekly: ‘The more upscale
nature of our audience overlaps more with people who read than does the
normal Hollywood audience’ (Coffey, 1993: 28).4

Film Marketing: Seasonality, Width and Location

If distribution can be considered the ‘making’ of a contemporary film, it
is the specific marketing strategies employed by the distributor that deter-
mine whether a film succeeds or fails in the marketplace. Distribution
campaigns centre upon the crucial elements of seasonality (the time of
year at which a film is released), release width (the number of cinemas
showing the film, including the rate at which this figure expands) and
location (the geographical areas, from the level of nations, through metro-
poles down to specific neighbourhoods) in which the film is screened
(Moul and Shugan, 2005). As film producer Paul N. Lazarus III sum-
marises the challenge, the key to successful distribution is ‘positioning the
picture in the marketplace with the right campaign, at the right time of
year, in the right number of theaters’ (2005: 149). While film distributors
have commercial return foremost in mind when devising distribution
rollout for particular films, evidence of critical endorsement comes also,
as we shall see, into consideration as a vital publicity asset for a particular
class of films – currencies of commercial and cultural capital being deeply
imbricated in the promotion of arthouse features. Rather than disdaining
such commercial manoeuvrings as grubby machinations detached from
the realm of film art, adaptation scholars would do well to ponder how
their own encounters with screen texts which seem to cry out for dis-
course analysis may have themselves been crucially mediated by institu-
tional and commercial modes of textual circulation. Nor is this a solely
one-way relationship; widespread critical fixation upon particular film
texts or auteurist directors may prompt reciprocal behaviour on the part
of distributors, such as revivals, midnight screenings, classics packaging
and incorporation into festival programming.

Seasonality
With Hollywood representing the overwhelmingly dominant commercial
and cultural centre of global audiovisual production, the seasonal calen-
dar most influential for film distributors is indisputably that of the United
States. It has long been received wisdom within distribution circles that
 Cultivating the Reader 165
blockbusters and especially family films are best released in the northern-
hemisphere summer when children and adolescents have more available
leisure time, and hence can contribute optimally to total box-office figures.
By way of similar logic, briefer US holidays and long weekends such as
Independence Day and Thanksgiving also constitute attractive slots for
major studio releases. One minor rider on this industry logic may be a
film’s content: a Christmas-themed would-be blockbuster will opt for
seasonal appropriateness over the summer’s longer holiday period to
maximise ‘destination’ cinema visits by patrons attracted to seasonally-
appropriate fare. By contrast, arthouse films (including the vast majority
of literary adaptations) typically schedule their releases for late in the year
in the run-up to Academy Award nominations (since 2004 announced in
late January) culminating six weeks later in the global live broadcast of the
awards ceremony itself (Moul and Shugan, 2005: 99–100). Distributors’
logic has been that Academy voters are likely to be most influenced by
critical buzz surrounding a recently released film and that, conversely,
voters are liable to have positive recollections of a film released earlier in
the year of eligibility eclipsed by the marketing campaigns for later films.
As a result of this distinctive seasonal clustering of blockbuster films on
one hand and arthouse releases on the other, the distribution calendar had
tended to fall into well demarcated alternating mass-market and prestige
phases (Moul and Shugan, 2005: 85, 126).
However, since around the turn of the millennium, distributors have
experimented successfully with what Amir Malin of independent Artisan
Entertainment terms ‘counterprogramming’, whereby an arthouse film’s
release is deliberately scheduled against the opening weekend of a studio
blockbuster to provide cineaste audiences with a palatable alternative to
the marketing juggernaut and crowded cinemas primed for mainstream
taste (Lyman, 2000: E1; Lukk, 1997: 121–22).5 Mark Gill, president of
Miramax’s Los Angeles office, encapsulates this market-segmenting logic
as the principle that ‘my mother needs something to see’; the archetypal
regular cinema-goer may now be an adolescent or 20-something male, but
the studios’ overconcentration on this demographic may leave an older,
educated and specifically female audience underserved (Lyman, 2000: E1;
Wyatt, 1994: 96). Producers and distributors thus seek, through catering
to the arthouse market, to expand the total cinema audience. A path-
breaking film in this regard (as in many others) was Steven Soderbergh’s
sex, lies, and videotape (1989) which ‘waited just a bit for that now
established early August slot when the studio juggernaut is beginning to
wear down and intelligent viewers are getting desperate’ (Pierson, 1995:
131; see also Biskind, 2004: 25–26; Berra, 2008: 167). Because the art-
house audience tends to be reviews-led, rather than influenced by the
mass-market television advertising of the studio blockbuster, releasing a
literary adaptation in direct opposition to a Hollywood tent-pole film may
actually prove a cost-effective marketing tactic, picking up audiences
166 Cultivating the Reader
disgruntled with the mainstream products on offer and thus more than
usually receptive to the critical guidance of broadsheet newspaper recom-
mendations.

Release Width
The aspect of film marketing given greatest attention in trade papers such
as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter is the ‘width’ of a film’s opening.
This is because of the direct correlation between the number of cinemas
exhibiting a film and the contemporary industry’s crucial indicator of
mainstream success: a film’s opening weekend box-office grosses. This
trend towards ‘opening big’ is the legacy of the blockbuster mode of satu-
ration release pioneered by Steven Spielberg’s directorial breakthrough
Jaws (1975), which demonstrated that, at a certain point, a film’s ultra-
wide opening served not merely to augment the film’s advertising cam-
paign, it became it (Wyatt, 1994: 109–12; 2005: 229; Hunter, 2009: 21).
Contemporary films tend to be released according to one of three domi-
nant patterns, based upon anticipated audience numbers and their rate
and modes of media exposure: wide release, involving simultaneous
release on around 3,000 screens across the US and now, increasingly,
simultaneous global release to maximise publicity and minimise piracy;
limited release, involving a moderately scaled release of around 700 US
screens for movies with anticipated middle of the road success; and so-
called ‘platform’ or tiered release for prestige film projects (Wyatt, 1994:
19, 112; Pierson, 1995: 170; Lukk, 1997: 126; Epstein, 2005: 177–91;
Lazarus, 2005: 154; Moul and Shugan, 2005: 92; Kerrigan, 2010: 161).
Like counterprogramming, platform release strategies have been honed
through close attention to the behaviours and predilections of the middle-
class, tertiary-educated, inner-urban professional demographic which
constitutes the core market for literary adaptations as well as, through
no coincidence, for book retailers. Prestige projects typically open in only
a handful of the largest North American cities (typically New York,
Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto) and seek to maximise critical praise,
festival awards and preview screening buzz before expanding slowly.
They attempt to build positive word of mouth sequentially, first amongst
target demographics in the initial metropoles, then more peripheral
locations (second-tier cities, state capitals, college towns) and so on to
the smallest viable markets (Lukk, 1997: xiii). In the words of enter-
tainment attorney and producers’ representative Mark Litwak, ‘specialty
films are marketed with little, if any, television advertising. The distri-
butor places much more reliance on benefit screenings, free publicity,
festival showings, critical reviews, and other methods designed to spread
positive word-of-mouth’ (Foreword to Lukk, 1997: xiii). The benefits for
specialist distributors in rolling out literary adaptations in such a stag-
gered and gradual manner are multiple. First, it has proven considerably
 Cultivating the Reader 167
cheaper than ‘opening big’ because the targeted release kept P&A costs
down as reels from one city could be couriered to and reused in others at
a later point in the release schedule. Secondly, it means specialty distri-
butors, who typically have weaker bargaining power vis-à-vis the largest
cinema chains, do not have to compete directly for mass bookings against
mainstream studio projects. Thirdly, the audience sector in question is
most likely to respond to positive review, opinion-editorial and features
coverage in weekly or monthly print periodicals which cannot be precisely
coordinated to appear on a specific opening weekend, and which may also
be consumed over the course of days or weeks rather than simultan-
eous with the date of publication (Perren, 2001: 31; Berra, 2008: 163;
Kerrigan, 2010: 101).
For the specialist distributor seeking to coordinate a platform campaign
for a prestige literary adaptation, the chief marketing hooks are critical
praise, awards plaudits, name stars and a pre-sold property. Again, Mark
Litwak ranks industry motivations:

In looking to market independent films . . . distributors like Sony

Classics look for one or more of the following elements: cast, reviews
and festival honors. Basically, distributors of independently made
films sell them on the basis of either the cast or occasionally a name
director like Spike Lee or Quentin Tarantino; on the basis of winning
film festivals, especially the important ones like Sundance, Toronto,
or Cannes; and on the basis of critical reviews from important media
outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the
trade papers. If an independent film does not have at least one of the
aforementioned marketing hooks, the film is unlikely to interest most
distributors.
(Quoted in Lukk, 1997: 118)

It is important to note here that opinion-setting periodicals such as the

New York Times are precisely the outlets by which book marketers set
most store and for the same reason: that they attract a predominantly
well-educated and affluent urban readership with disposable income to
spend on leisure activities that enhance their individual cultural capital.
This extant readership is not, as the following section explores, in itself
sufficient to ensure the commercial success of a film release, but its initial
imprimatur functions as early-adopter endorsement which can in turn be
exploited as the basis for a mainstream, cross-over publicity campaign.
Vital in choreographing such release strategies is that, even though they
are devised on a national (if not international) level, they must be imple-
mented locally to preserve the intimate producer–audience dynamic on
which the arthouse market thrives and by which it consciously distin-
guishes itself from the mainstream multiplex experience. Writing in the
New York Times, film journalist Rick Lyman quotes Marcy Granata,
168 Cultivating the Reader
president of publicity and corporate communications at Miramax, in
explaining the importance of a grassroots, market-specific rollout:

instead of spending a lot of money to generate excitement over one

huge opening, smaller distributors must stage a series of small-scale
openings, each week trying to attract the attention of a new crop of
local critics and talk show hosts. . . . You treat the opening in Boston
as if it were a national opening. The local, grass-roots effort becomes
very, very primary’.
(2000: 1)

Location
While selection of the largest and most media-concentrated metropolitan
locales is clearly key in devising a platform release strategy, film distri-
butors also pay minute attention to the demographic profiles of individual
urban neighbourhoods when selecting exhibition outlets. Film marketing
scholar Finola Kerrigan observes that ‘in negotiating with cinemas/cinema
chains, it is important to match the film’s target audience with the
demographic profile of the cinema’s catchment audience’ (2010: 99). The
arthouse sector’s key consumer profile – educated, middle-class and
predominantly female – favours selection of ‘destination’ cinemas in
precincts boasting a high number of cultural institutions, educational pro-
viders, bars, cafes and restaurant culture. Such ‘upscale’ neighbourhoods
(in US film marketing parlance) represent the natural habitat of the creative
industries’ much mythologised ‘bobo’ or bourgeois bohemian, a subject
alert to the potential of consuming carefully chosen cultural artefacts as a
means to broadcast individual identity (Lukk, 1997: 127; Brooks, 2000).
These are precisely (again no surprise) the inner-urban precincts in which
independent bookstores with a high degree of community engagement
have tended to hold out best against the encroachment of the chain stores
since the advent of the ‘book wars’ of the 1990s (Miller, 1999; 2006;
Epstein, 2001; Squires, 2007). Hence the Venn diagram-like dual focus of
both book and arthouse film marketing sectors on a particular bobo
demographic – earlier identified by Fine Line Features’ executives in pro-
moting Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) – can be seen to have become
standard industry practice some decade-and-a-half later.
The 1990s is routinely viewed in both trade and academic writings as
the period during which independent cinema (especially in the US) came
of age and established a mainstream critical and market profile which had
eluded it in the previous era of quasi-underground repertory and ‘art film’
cinema (Pierson, 1995; Holmlund and Wyatt, 2005; Holmlund, 2008). In
this context it is not surprising that the early 1990s also witnessed a
landmark platform release campaign for a literary adaptation that became
the prototype for a whole sector of critically esteemed, Oscar-ambitious
 Cultivating the Reader 169
releases. Howards End (1992), a Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M.
Forster’s novel (1910), was approached by its US distributor Sony
Pictures Classics as an opportunity to trial a new form of prestige release
strategy. With Merchant Ivory’s established brand-name identity for
producing lavishly costumed, artfully shot, consciously literary period
adaptations, long-time screenwriting partner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s
intelligent script, an A-list British cast including Anthony Hopkins,
Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson, and
Forster’s canonical ‘pre-sold’ literary property, Sony Pictures Classics felt
it was handling a project ‘that has got Oscars written all over it’ (quoted
in Lukk, 1997: 126). Such heritage film projects, precisely pitched to set
Academy Award members’ quality-picture antennae quivering, are now
rather cynically dubbed ‘Oscar bait’ by the blogosphere’s legions of
Academy Awards amateur pundits (Berra, 2008: 173; Hunter, 2009: 10).6
Sony Pictures Classics opened Howards End unusually narrowly,
premiering the film in 70 mm at a sole venue (Manhattan’s prestigious
Paris Theatre, the US’s longest-operating arthouse cinema),7 slowly
building critical buzz and word of mouth, and only expanding the film
very gradually in the lead-up to the Academy Awards nominations.
Eventually, propelled by critical eulogising and bedecked with nine Oscar
nominations and wins for Thompson (Best Actress) and Jhabvala (Best
Adapted Screenplay), the film played on 450 US screens – a considerable
achievement for a decidedly highbrow, foreign, period adaptation
(Pierson, 1995: 203; Lukk, 1997: 124).8 Tom Bernard, part of the Sony
Pictures Classics team which trialled the ‘tortoiselike’ Howards End
release, notes with satisfaction that the film ‘was a landmark in this new
crossover of specialized film distribution’ and has since been imitated with
success in release of films such as The Remains of the Day (1993), Leaving
Las Vegas (1995), Dead Man Walking (1995), and Sense and Sensibility
(1995) – all of them literary adaptations (Pierson, 1995: 203; Lukk, 1997:
128; see also Hernandez and Rabinowitz, 1999). It is not that the extant
readership for such classic or contemporary works in itself guarantees
sufficient audience to ensure a film adaptation’s success; rather, enthu-
siastic endorsement on the part of the book community can – if cultivated
at the right time, in the right cities, and clustered around the right
neighbourhoods – generate a critical groundswell that may serve as the
impetus for a cross-over publicity campaign propelling a film adaptation
‘out of the arthouse ghetto’ and bringing ‘quirky new sensibilities to mass
America’.9

Miramax and the Weinstein Brothers: ‘Campaigning for

Oscar Nominations’10
Any discussion of arthouse literary adaptation over the preceding 20 years
must, inevitably, weigh the impact of production–distribution company
170 Cultivating the Reader
Miramax and of its semi-legendary founders, the Weinstein brothers.
Hollywood heavyweights Harvey and Bob Weinstein began Miramax as
a small-scale independent distributor in 1979 in upstate New York,
specialising in rock concert, live comedy, foreign and underground
features principally for the college circuit (Biskind, 2004: 13). From the
mid 1990s especially, Miramax became synonymous with upscale,
arthouse films which managed to cross over into mainstream, blockbuster
successes (Wyatt, 1998b: 76; Cook, 2007: 55; Berra, 2008: 162, 170–71;
King, 2009: 93). Beginning with the breakthrough of Steven Soderbergh’s
1989 Palme d’Or win at the Cannes Film Festival for sex, lies, and
videotape, the Weinsteins guided a record number of arthouse produc-
tions to mainstream prominence, amongst them literary adaptations
Trainspotting (1996), The English Patient (1996), The Wings of the Dove
(1997), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Chocolat (2000), The Lord of
the Rings trilogy (2001–03) and Cold Mountain (2003) (Pierson, 1995:
127; Perren, 2001: 33; Berra, 2008: 163, 167). The need to capitalise
rapid expansion prompted the Weinsteins to sign a co-distribution deal
with unlikely corporate partner Disney in 1993, prior to outright sale of
Miramax to Disney in 2005 (Wyatt, 1998b: 84; Perren, 2001: 30;
Bordwell and Thompson, 2004: 16; Berra, 2008: 170; Sctoodeh, 2009:
60). Shortly afterwards, the Weinsteins founded and continue to lead their
own production and distribution outfit, The Weinstein Company (TWC),
which specialises in distributing independent-minded and arthouse film
product in the key US theatrical market. In July 2010, in an announce-
ment that many interpreted as signalling the end of a particular era of
American ‘independent’ film, Disney announced the sale of Miramax.
Despite reported interest from the Weinstein brothers in buying back their
original company, Miramax was sold to US investment group Filmyard
Holdings (James, 2010).
Film scholar Alisa Perren proposes three criteria evident in Miramax’s
choice of films during the company’s spectacular run of success from
1989: strong potential for festival-circuit and critical acclaim; edgy,
boundary-pushing subject matter and/or avant-garde cinematic styles;
and the ability to sustain marketing campaigns centred upon sensational,
exploitation-style publicity (2001: 31–34). The classic Miramax film of
the 1990s depicted liberal amounts of sex (frequently of non-vanilla
varieties), nudity, drug use, violence or hot-button political issues to, in
the words of Mark Gill, ‘maximiz[e] publicity value’ (Hernandez and
Rabinowitz, 1999; Wyatt, 1998b: 80; 2005: 236, 241; Berra, 2008:
165–66; Villarejo, 2008: 79–84; King, 2009: 93–94). Examples include
Scandal (1989), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989),
The Crying Game (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994). MPAA classification
rulings serving to restrict entry of certain age groups to particular
Miramax films were repeatedly challenged by the distributors, and the
resultant cause célèbre was then itself incorporated into Miramax’s
 Cultivating the Reader 171
publicity campaigns, with the film’s posters typically foregrounding the
controversial subject matter (Cook, 2007: 55). The best known of such
Miramax sexploitation marketing campaigns concerned the depiction of
underage sex and drug use amongst US teenagers in Kids (1995).11 Kids
was derived from an original screenplay, but scripts adapted from literary
properties also commonly attracted and thus necessitated the Weinsteins’
marketing savvy in exploiting the publicity-maximising possibilities of
controversy. Marketing Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader (2008), based
on Bernard Schlink’s controversial novel about a formative sexual rela-
tionship between an ex-concentration camp guard and an underage boy
in post-war Germany, Harvey Weinstein achieved a personal best in po-
faced understatement: ‘The Holocaust is a touchy subject, and then you
throw in the sexual stuff, and it’s really difficult’ (Grover, 2009). This is
where cultivating the existing prestige of a literary novel and its author
becomes essential for sustaining a publicity-friendly, Lady Chatterley-
inspired defence of groundbreaking, difficult ‘art’ in the face of cinema’s
traditionally more circumspect stance on censorship, given its status as an
avowedly mass medium of primarily visual power (Becket, 2006;
Robertson, 2010). Invoking an adapted book’s literary critical praise and
prize-winning pedigree provides film distributors with a defence to accu-
sations that they are engaging in profit-motivated exploitation tactics.
Although, of course, the involvement of a book’s author and the broader
literary community may play into precisely such exploitation dynamics,
as participants all the while continue claiming to abhor them. Thus book
community endorsement provides a critical fig-leaf that is especially useful
in the marketing of adaptations that are controversial for their subject
matter, revealing how the early-adopter literary audience is useful to
distributors not only as a preview-audience cheer-squad but also as
media-savvy cultural and intellectual defenders of artistic expression.
This returns us to the key question prompted by the Weinsteins: why
do producers of arthouse literary adaptations so assiduously court book-
world institutions and loyal readers? Certainly it is not for box-office
revenue alone; as Publishers Weekly correctly observes, ‘When you look
at what a big book in publishing is versus how many people you need to
go to a movie for it to be successful, the numbers are very different’
(Maas, 2001: 25). The Weinsteins’ motivation is rather more complex
than this, breaking down into a three-pronged marketing and publicity
strategy. First, loyal readers of an acclaimed novel are important chiefly
as opinion-setting early-adopters; as outlined in the previous section, this
group’s positive responses to a film adaptation can be used as a launch
pad for a broader distribution and publicity campaign. In the second
phase of distributors’ strategy, fan approval can be used as the base on
which to build critical and reviewer praise at key festivals and especially
in the build-up to the film awards season, culminating with the Academy
Awards. Finally, nominations for the most prestigious awards (the
172 Cultivating the Reader
Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the respective New York and
Los Angeles Film Critics Awards), and especially award wins (particularly
for the ‘Big Four’ Oscar categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best
Actor and Best Actress), can be leveraged into a mainstream publicity
campaign and distribution plan targeting the mass audience (Kerrigan,
2010: 169). For sporadic film-goers, the Academy’s list of Best Picture
nominees functions as a convenient shorthand denoting industry con-
sensus on the year’s most accomplished films. As Liz Manne, executive
vice president of marketing for Fine Line, stated in relation to Australian
film Shine’s nomination in the Best Picture category for the 1997
Academy Awards, ‘Now we have something that’s genuinely marketable
in a mainstream way. . . . Moviegoers all over the world go to see the best
five pictures of the year. Even if they only go to five, that’s what you’ve
got’ (quoted in Klady, 1997: 9). The familiar post-Oscars box-office
‘bounce’ thus attests to the awards’ role as a conversion mechanism by
which the esteem of literary and cineaste critical communities can be
transmuted into commercial returns from mainstream audiences. The
image of the Oscar statuette on a film’s publicity materials thus stands as
a particularly resonant example of what James F. English describes as the
prize system’s intraconversion of two ostensibly incompatible currencies:
critical esteem and financial capital. The fact that the two systems of
evaluation can be linked through the Weinsteins’ characteristic distribu-
tion strategy strongly echoes Chapter 4’s analysis of ‘the Booker effect’ in
literature, again calling into question Bourdieu’s positing of the realms of
restricted and mass-market production as relatively autonomous. It is
important to bear in mind, however, that for most literary screen adap-
tations the mainstream audience should not be thought of as coterminous
with the mass audience for a typical summer blockbuster. Rather, it com-
prises an accumulation of multiple niche audiences on an international
scale (Perren, 2001; Raw, 2004; Eaton, 2006). If successful, this third and
final phase realises the ultimate goal of the Weinsteins’ distribution
strategy and that for which the name of distributor Miramax gained an
almost auteurish power: the arthouse/mainstream quality indie cross-over
(Biskind, 2004: 323; Villarejo, 2008: 81; King, 2009: 136).
Three examples of slow-build marketing campaigns for disparate
Miramax literary adaptations across a 12-year period serve to illustrate
the Weinsteins’ increasing confidence and sophistication in imitating rival
Sony Pictures Classics’ earlier success with Howards End and in further
refining the staggered-release strategy. In 1996 Miramax had high hopes
for UK director Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, an edgy, blackly comic look
at life amongst Edinburgh heroin addicts adapted from Irvine Welsh’s
cult Scottish dialect novel of the same name, and which had already
proven a mainstream success in UK theatrical release after an innovative,
youth-focussed distribution campaign by PolyGram. Despite the film
being replete with strong Scottish accents and opaque Edinburgh slang,
 Cultivating the Reader 173
Miramax was ambitious for the film’s transatlantic prospects, even
distributing free copies of John Hodge’s published screenplay (1996) to
every critic at Manhattan press screenings to bridge the cultural gap:12

Within the first two weeks of North American release, Trainspotting

is already slated to move beyond the Los Angeles-New York-Toronto
axis to 200 upper-end screens in 60 to 65 markets, already exceeding
‘art house’ proportions. Miramax’s test screening scores are its
highest of the year: a 91-per-cent rating of excellent or very good
(versus the average of 45 to 55 per cent). . . . ‘We do think it will cross
over to the mainstream,’ says Miramax president of marketing Mark
Gill.
(Rothman, 1996: D5)

Despite Miramax’s slowing down and redubbing of two sequences in

which the characters’ Edinburgh brogues proved particularly impene-
trable for US audiences, Trainspotting did not manage to replicate its UK
success amongst transatlantic youth demographics. It was a Miramax
property released later that same year, Anthony Minghella’s The English
Patient, with which the Weinsteins perfected their staggered distribution
formula, driving the film all the way to 12 Academy Award nominations,
and wins in a remarkable nine categories, including the keenly sought Best
Picture. Writing in mid-February’s lead-up to the Academy Award cere-
mony, Variety correspondent Leonard Klady presciently wrote:

Miramax’s ‘Patient’ has already grossed $42 million in North

America. Last weekend its distrib [sic] added 400 playdates to its run
to bring it to 1,042 theaters and 79 more playdates following the
announcement of nominees. Awards momentum should propel it to
$70 million by Oscar eve, March 23. Major prizes would mean an
eventual domestic B.O. [box-office] of more than $100 million.
(1997: 9)

By 2008 the Weinsteins, having departed Miramax and now overseeing

their independently owned, self-named distribution company, engaged
in an especially calculated and hard-fought distribution campaign for
The Reader. The film, which had been earmarked as ‘an Oscar contender
before filming begins’ on the basis of its literary pedigree, star cast and
major creative personnel, premiered in limited release on 10 December
2008, before expanding on 25 December in the post-Christmas build-up
to the Academy Award nominations, opening nationally across the US on
9 January 2009 (Alberge, 2007: 23). Upon the announcement of Oscar
nominations in late January, Harvey Weinstein declared his intention
to ‘expand the flick to play on 1,100 screens’ and ‘we’ll go to 2,000 if that
goes well’ (Grover, 2009). Kate Winslet’s subsequent win in the Best
174 Cultivating the Reader
Actress category may have been less than TWC had hoped to take home
from five Academy nominations, but it was nevertheless sufficient to
propel the film to a US domestic box-office total of $US34 million.13 All
three of these examples, especially when considered consecutively,
underline the extent to which producer–distributors of literary adapta-
tions stage-manage public exposure to screen releases through a mode of
concentric audience expansion. Far from assuming that readers of a book
will, en masse, simply discover a film adaptation of their own accord
because of prior familiarity with the source text, film distributors strive
to engineer that particular classes of a book’s readership, in targeted
metropolitan locales, will express their critical praise for a film adaptation
at precisely the right moment in the film’s (inter)national rollout. The
degree of cross-sectoral choreography involved and the human resources
committed by distributors to achieving this result are quite staggering,
and thoroughly belie adaptation scholars’ implicit assumption that loyal
readers are seemingly naturally convertible into willing cinema audiences.
In making the contemporary blockbuster literary adaptation it is clear
that the stars required to align are not only those strolling the Academy’s
red carpet, but a whole constellation of book and screen industry nodal
agents distributed across the adaptation industry’s complexly intertwined
circuits.

Invoking the Adaptation Industry

Having established film distributors’ construction of the literary adap-
tation audience through a finely-honed strategy of concentric expansion,
it is appropriate now to examine examples of other agents in the adap-
tation industry being invoked to authorise literary adaptations for cinema
audiences. Such a survey also functions neatly as a recapitulation and
summary of the adaptation industry model proposed in this volume’s
Introduction and explored throughout the preceding chapters, involving
as it does authors, rights holders, publishers, screenwriters, directors and
film marketing and publicity personnel. The following examples help to
put further flesh on the loosely Bourdieusian model advanced throughout
the present volume: that the contemporary Anglophone adaptation
industry comprises multiple book- and film-world agents both mutually
dependent as well as locked into often unarticulated rivalries over maxi-
mising the cultural and commercial capital flows deriving from the
adaptation process.

Keeping Company with Wolves: Getting Distribution Wrong

Reflecting on the allegedly hit-and-miss nature of US arthouse film distri-
bution in the pre-Miramax era, Harvey Weinstein has spoken disparag-
ingly of distributors who ‘slap out a movie, put an ad in the newspaper –
 Cultivating the Reader 175
usually not a very good one – and hope the audience will find it by a
miracle. And most often they don’t’ (quoted in Perren, 2001: 34). In an
industry characterised by imitation of others’ successes, it is salutary to
consider briefly an example of film distribution failing to capitalise upon
existing audiences for a literary work and thus disappointing both
critically and commercially. Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves
(1984) is an adaptation of a number of UK author Angela Carter’s short
stories from her celebrated collection The Bloody Chamber (1979), in
particular her tour de force feminist, post-Freudian reimagining of the
Little Red Riding Hood fairytale as a parable for nascent female sexual
desire. Carter had, by the early 1980s, achieved significant profile as a
brilliantly imaginative and linguistically dexterous author and, parti-
cularly through her association with feminist publishing house Virago,
had become widely known amongst feminist and more broadly leftwing
cultural circles in the UK and the countries of the former British
Commonwealth (Murray, 2004a). Despite this seemingly in-built
audience, the film’s US distributor Cannon foregrounded the werewolf
theme in their marketing campaign and positioned Jordan’s adaptation
not in the arthouse/repertory cinema niche but as a mainstream horror
feature (Stanley, 1992). Somewhat predictably, the film’s psycho-
analytical subtexts and startlingly unconventional gender politics failed
dismally to resonate with predominantly young, male US horror film
audiences, whose poor word of mouth effectively killed the film’s trans-
atlantic prospects. Perhaps relying on the truism that a book’s existing
readership is never, of itself, sufficient to recoup an adaptation’s pro-
duction costs, Cannon made the fatal error of bypassing it altogether.
Cannon thus failed to capitalise on the property’s existing public profile
by neglecting to connect with fans of Carter’s work, and moreover failed
to attract an alternative genre-film audience either. This bungled mar-
keting campaign incited the chagrin of the film’s director, who believed
his movie ‘required far more sensitive handling’, and Carter’s legion
readers whose posts on Internet Movie Database typically declare the film
a little-known gem (Stanley, 1992: 35).14 In collating the following
examples of distributors’ conscious cultivation of the book-world com-
munity, I aim to counterpoise Cannon’s clumsy handling of an adaptation
with examples of literary distribution adeptly harnessing existing public
awareness of a literary work and channelling it to break through to
mainstream audiences.

Involving the Author

Chapter 1 has analysed in some detail the phenomenon of the celebrity
authorial persona and the conscription of this figure by the screen
industries to publicly badge a screen adaptation as legitimately ‘faithful’ to
its source text (whether or not it can actually be considered so is, of course,
176 Cultivating the Reader
irrelevant, both for the purposes of the current study and of Hollywood
itself). For distributors, the authorial seal of approval finds its most
emblematic moment in the author’s appearance on the red carpet at an
adaptation’s premiere. Thus, for example, Miramax flew Scottish author
Irvine Welsh to the Cannes Film Festival for Trainspotting’s premiere, at
which the feature received a rapturous ten-minute standing ovation
(Gerstel, 1996a; Rothman, 1996). Even better for suturing together the
authorial persona and a screen adaptation is the pseudo-Hitchcockian
device of the authorial cameo, again as outlined in Chapters 1 and 4, for
its suggestion of an author not merely stuffed into a dinner-jacket and
dragooned into a premiere appearance, but one who has collaborated
during the lengthy production phase of a project, and whose creative
benediction thus suffuses the text itself. In this regard, Danny Boyle’s
casting of Welsh (himself a former heroin addict) as long-time drug dealer
Mikey Forrester in an early sequence of Trainspotting offers a knowing
wink to cognoscenti audiences (Rawsthorn, 1996a; Paget, 1999: 136;
Jeffers, 2006: 150).15 Welsh, playing up to the film’s hyper-knowing,
postmodern attitude of cool irony and mocking self-referentiality, makes
it clear in an interview published with the film’s screenplay that he was
wise to Boyle’s game:

It’s something that I would have done if I’d been him because its [sic]
effective. It stops the author from criticizing the film because you
can’t say, ‘Oh, my God, they’ve ruined my book!’ because you’ve
been a part of the whole process and you’ve joined in. That’s a kind
of frivolous thing to say, but I think that it always adds a bit of
intrigue.
(Hodge, 1996: 119)

German author Bernard Schlink’s cameo appearance as an extra in the

bicycling holiday/beer garden sequence in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader
serves the same audience-assuaging purpose, though in the case of The
Reader Schlink’s brief onscreen appearance is only the most visible textual
trace of the author’s years-long involvement with the adaptation pro-
ject.16 Schlink, Daldry and screenwriter David Hare undertook a lengthy
tour of Germany to explore issues of the long-term historical legacy of the
Holocaust, German war guilt, and the ambiguous feelings of Germany’s
post-war generation towards that of their parents (Kaminer, 2008). This
particularly close author–screenwriter–director collaboration, perhaps
necessitated by what Harvey Weinstein rightly recognised as the project’s
doubly controversial subject matter, is one the extensive production notes
provided on the film’s website take pains to emphasise.17 In fact, not only
does the website prominently flag above its main menu that the film is
‘based on the best-selling novel’, the website design itself consciously
remediates the format of the codex book for the quite differently pro-
 Cultivating the Reader 177

Figure 6.1 Official website for The Reader (2008), showing attempts to
remediate the codex format and flagging of the novel’s prize-winning
pedigree (top left-hand corner)

portioned computer screen. The Reader’s main webpage flows into a

series of paper-textured, deckle-edged subpages, as though to reassure the
book’s millions of bibliophile fans that – despite the evidence contained
in the lengthy production notes – the film represents a minimally mediated
version of the book come to life.
In situations where a contemporary (as opposed to classic) literary
author is no longer alive, securing authorial imprimatur is, suffice to say,
a rather more complex matter. It is, nevertheless, still possible. The initial
phases of the marketing campaign for Robert Altman’s adaptation Short
Cuts dwelt at length on the approval bestowed on the director by
Raymond Carver’s window, the poet Tess Gallagher. In an interview for
the Boston Globe (precisely the kind of broadsheet newspaper most
commonly perused by the distributor’s targeted early-adopter US literary
demographic), Altman spoke of Gallagher vetting his screenplay and
explicitly stated her support for its departures at points from Carver’s
narratives:

I sent the script to her with great trepidation. She was terrific; she
got it. She said, ‘Thank God you’re not doing one of those literal
178 Cultivating the Reader
translations’. She made a few comments on things she didn’t think
Ray would have done in certain stories. In some cases, we made
changes to listen to what she said.
(Carr, 1993: A1)

Similarly, the lead-up to the film’s release saw tie-in Carver-focussed

features appear in key metropolitan literary periodicals the New Yorker,
and the New York Times, in which Altman drives home to any potentially
sniffy literati the fact that Gallagher ‘talks about [the film] in superlative
terms’ (Weinraub, 1993: 11). An extended interview between Altman and
Gallagher even appeared in the front pages of the US literary world’s print
apogee, the New York Times Book Review (Stewart, 1993). Gallagher’s
remark to Publishers Weekly (again, an apposite choice of media outlet)
that, ‘risking trespass’, she believed ‘Carver would have approved of the
film’, perfectly illustrates how the right of imprimatur over a screen
adaptation appears to pass, like the film rights themselves, to a deceased
author’s literary executor (Coffey, 1993: 28).18 Despite Carver’s death in
1988, Short Cuts could thus be squarely positioned five years later by its
producers and distributors as the meeting of – indeed almost a collab-
oration between – two giants in the depiction of contemporary American
mores: author Carver and auteur Altman (Wyatt, 1998b: 83).

Accompanying Literature
In considering elements of the adaptation industry other than the author
that can be recruited into the marketing campaign for a screen adaptation,
I want to return to and examine in some detail The Reader. Such a choice,
late in the present volume, might look like a reversion to adaptation
studies’ wearyingly familiar methodology of the case study, and hence
contradict my Introduction’s exasperation at the ubiquity of this practice.
In fact, it is not any exceptionalism of The Reader (scholars’ usual reason
for selecting a case study) that motivates this choice but rather its very
typicality. Invocation of the full panoply of adaptation-industry agents in
the marketing campaign constructed for The Reader serves as an exem-
plar of the Weinsteins’ current strategy for releasing an awards-friendly,
upmarket literary adaptation.
The release pattern of The Reader, as already mentioned, clearly
evinces a deliberate strategy of incremental familiarisation amongst
opinion-setting audiences. But in fact the Weinsteins’ cultivation of The
Reader’s readers began as much as two years prior to the film’s formal
premiere. During development and pre-production phases, key personnel
were assembled whose cinematic track records, as well as their combined
clout with the literary community, were designed to maximise the film’s
chances of critical – and through this, commercial – success. British
director Stephen Daldry, though a relatively recent entrant to the screen
 Cultivating the Reader 179
world after a celebrated career directing for the stage in London’s West
End, had previously guided Nicole Kidman to an Oscar-winning per-
formance in his adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-
winning The Hours (2002), itself an intertextual homage to Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and thus a film with impeccable literary
credentials. The screenwriter of both The Hours and The Reader was
British theatre giant Sir David Hare, arguably the UK’s most esteemed
living playwright and a major figure within Britain’s cultural establish-
ment (Hare, 2008; 2009; ‘The Reader’, 2008). The collective cultural
capital of director, screenwriter, and the book’s German author, Schlink,
was combined with the film’s star wattage in the form of Winslet and
Ralph Fiennes at the film’s international premiere at the Berlin Film
Festival in February 2009. Not only is the Berlinale one of the festival
circuit’s A-ranked events, as outlined in Chapter 3, but it also offered an
important public relations opportunity given the story’s inextricable
enmeshment with uniquely sensitive issues of Germany’s recent history.
The Weinstein Company was clearly aware that incremental audience
expansion solely in the domestic US market would prove insufficient; in
terms of both cultural resonance and market size, the film’s success in
Germany would be crucial to its fortunes in foreign markets, from which
Hollywood now earns the majority of its revenues.19 Variety’s clear-eyed

Figure 6.2 Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Reader showing (left to
right) actor David Kross, author Bernhard Schlink, actor Kate
Winslet, scriptwriter David Hare, director Stephen Daldry and actor
Ralph Fiennes (6 February 2009)
© Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images
180 Cultivating the Reader
assessment of the picture’s fortunes had already registered that, even with
Academy endorsement, the picture’s ambivalent characterisation and art-
house mood predisposed it to achieve better foreign than domestic box-
office success: ‘pic will have trouble crossing over to the general public
Stateside. Offshore prospects look stronger’ (McCarthy, 2008).
The Weinstein Company’s executive vice president for marketing, Gary
Faber, meanwhile continued relentlessly to court literary-critical endorse-
ment for The Reader within the domestic market as well. At the film’s
US premiere in New York City (note, not the more typical film-world
location of Los Angeles) in the same week as the Berlinale, Bernhard
Schlink attended a standing-room-only question-and-answer session
following a screening of the film’s (much disputed) final cut.20 Business
Week’s correspondent, correctly diagnosing the motivation for this
unusual premiere format, observed that ‘Some academy members were
likely in the audience’ (Grover, 2009). The event was part of a broader
platform-release campaign for which TWC had ‘invited Jewish groups
from around the United States to early screenings and reached out to book
groups’ (Kaminer, 2008). Such events attempted to control dominant
public discourse about the film, counterbalancing some Jewish groups’
foreseeable objections to the film’s semi-sympathetic portrayal of a Nazi
camp guard with respect for the artistry of the film-makers in handling a
much-praised novel and Academy-Awards buzz for the performances of
the film’s lead actors.
An especially intriguing aspect of The Reader’s promotional campaign,
and one illustrating how formalised and regularised interactions between
the book and film worlds have become, was an exclusive preview of the
film convened by the Accompanied Literary Society (ALS). This New
York City-based, invitation-only group of celebrities, literati and cultural
industries movers and shakers self-describes on its Facebook page as:

a society of artists, intellectuals, tastemakers and cultural influencers

with a mission to directly support literature, publishing and the arts.
Accompanied brings together the intellectually curious, creates a
haven for discourse and the love of books, and promotes authors,
journalists, and artists through exclusive events.

Conceived as a twenty-first-century incarnation of pre-revolutionary

France’s famed literary salons, the ALS was established in 2007 by New
York socialite Brooke Geahan who, in the words of novelist Jonathan
Ames, ‘got inspired to start the Accompanied Literary Society because she
attended a very non-glamorous reading of mine at Barnes & Noble . . . I
thought it was glamorous enough but I guess she didn’t’ (Aleksander and
Neyfakh, 2008). The principal concern of the ALS is, in the words of
its website, ‘to extend the range and reach of literature’ by facilitating
interactions between elite members of the book world and the bright and
 Cultivating the Reader 181
beautiful of affiliated media industries (‘A Fashioning’, 2007; Aleksander
and Neyfakh, 2008).21 Given to throwing ‘Book to Film’ fundraisers on
Oscars night, the ALS would have envisaged a natural fit in hosting an
invitation-only pre-release screening of The Reader in November 2008.
The film’s director, Daldry, as well as other notables such as Michael
Cunningham and Angela’s Ashes author the late Frank McCourt, were in
attendance, and pictures and coverage of the event were circulated to
scene-setting media outlets such as Vanity Fair to build positive pre-
release buzz regarding the film’s artistic merit. How appropriate then that
this ideal forum for showcasing an awards-aspirant literary adaptation
should count amongst its sponsors representatives of both the publishing
(Canongate Books) and cinema (Warner Independent) sectors as well as,
more appositely, both Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company.22
Not satisfied with utilising extant film- and book-world circuits such as
major film festivals and international book fairs to normalise the pro-
duction and distribution of adapted properties, representatives of the
adaptation industries have now begun to convene their own fora to show-
case their pick of adaptation projects. With convenors exercising exclu-
sive control over scheduling, venues and guest lists, such micro-managed
events represent a new frontier in distributors’ platform-release strategis-
ing, precisely engineering the optimal environmental conditions for

Figure 6.3 The Accompanied Literary Society’s official webpage, again

reimagining the book format for the computer screen
182 Cultivating the Reader

Figure 6.4 Listing of Accompanied Literary Society sponsors including Harvey

Weinstein and The Weinstein Company

critical reception of adapted properties and – through that crucial conduit

– cross-over mass-market success.

Conclusion
The foregoing discussion has attempted to sketch some of the vast pro-
duction and distribution apparatus that surrounds individual adaptations
and which crucially mediates audience encounters with adapted film texts.
Acknowledgement of this larger political-economic landscape is not
unknown in studies of contemporary adaptations, although it is emphati-
cally marginalised. Christine Geraghty’s Now a Major Motion Picture is
innovative, as alluded to in the present’s volume’s Introduction, for her
rare willingness to move beyond the confines of adapted texts themselves
to examine ‘the cinematic culture that supports the films’ (2008: 48). In
the second chapter of her book, entitled ‘Art Cinema, Authorship, and the
Impossible Novel’, Geraghty investigates critical discourses surrounding
adaptations of classic Modernist authors such as Proust, Woolf and Joyce,
and finds film reviewers’ determination of the boundaries of the high-
brow ‘art cinema’ and its more middle-brow variant, ‘heritage cinema’,
precondition audiences’ reception of films in important ways (47–72).
 Cultivating the Reader 183
The early sections of Geraghty’s chapter gesture towards the industry
structures underpinning the genre of art cinema – specialist distributors/
exhibitors such as the British Film Institute, the importance of A-ranked
film festivals and their prizes, and marketers’ foregrounding of auteur
directors (50). But while she acknowledges that film producers and distri-
butors create publicity packs that may be drawn upon by film reviewers,
the overriding impression created by her analysis is of a film production
and distribution sector offering up its products to a powerful critical
lobby for approbation, damnation and/or classification according to
various generic niches.
The current chapter, through its analysis of the production–distribution
marketing machine through which contemporary literary adaptations
move, questions Geraghty’s presentation of the balance of power between
reviewers and film marketers. For just in the way that the celebrity profile
piece in newspapers and magazines has degenerated from an informal,
off-guard encounter between the star and an often named journalist into
a thoroughly choreographed, quasi-scripted ritual audience between the
god-like celebrity, surrounded by public-relations minders and a battery
of personal assistants, and largely tractable, semi-anonymous journalists,
so too has the playing field of film reviewing been tilted strongly in
marketers’ favour. This is not to argue that film marketing and publicity
staff write mainstream reviews of their films (at least not in reputable
publications, although pseudonymous reviewing on webfora is another
matter), but they have at their disposable powerful means for shaping the
critical reception of a contemporary literary adaptation. Through release
of a film at the optimal time of year, choice of premiere districts in media-
saturated metropolitan locales, upmarket venues stacked with hand-
picked audiences, down to the rate and geographical scale at which a
platform release is rolled out to build awards buzz and finally to attract
mainstream audiences, there is nothing accidental about a modern
audience member’s encounter with a screen adaptation. To date, adapta-
tion studies has failed to apprehend the complexity and influence of film
marketing’s role in the adaptation industry because of the methodological
stranglehold of textual analysis and its related suppositions – in particular
a superficial fixation on the ‘brand identity’ of the well-known source text
as seemingly self-sufficient guarantor of an adaptation’s audience appeal.
While name recognition for an adapted property is often highly significant
for securing production finance and in facilitating green-lighting and
casting, it is not in itself adequate to ensure that readers of the book will
be readily convertible into cinema audiences. An analogy might be made
with political marketing in democracies such as the US and UK where
voting is non-compulsory: voter knowledge of a candidate and their
policy platforms is important but ultimately futile unless that knowledge
can be actualised through ‘get out the vote’ measures. Equally, potential
audience members’ familiarity with a well-known source text (whether
184 Cultivating the Reader
first-hand or vicariously through knowledge of its cultural reputation) is
in itself insufficient. What is crucial for distributors is that the right
audience members in the right locations give desirable responses to the
film at the optimal point in the release cycle so that the wave of posi-
tive buzz so generated can be converted into the high-profile cinematic
esteem of Academy voters and, through this, publicised to mass audiences
globally. To build and maintain such an elaborate campaign for a film or
(in the case of Hollywood’s specialty distributors) multiple awards-
aspirant films in a single season requires enormous investment of human
and financial capital. In this context, the various other stakeholders in the
adaptation industry are called upon and expected to play their parts in
the interests of the adaptation field as a whole. The extent to which they
are willing to do so goes, however, to the very heart of the rivalrous co-
dependency that drives the adaptation industry.
Afterword
Restive Audiences and Adaptation
Futures

When reading the work of political economists of film, I am often

reminded of the climactic scene in that celebrated literary adaptation The
Wizard of Oz (1939), in which plucky Toto pulls aside a curtain to reveal
that the vast, glowering image of the Wizard and his booming voice are
all so many smoke-and-mirror technical effects being produced by a
cowering, utterly nondescript old man. The beguiling images, stirring
narratives and glamorous personae of the Hollywood film are, political
economists seem bent on reiterating, all reducible to an insatiable
industry machine focussed on accumulating profit above all else. The
reason such critics have, on occasion, lapsed into a shrill register is no
doubt due to frustration at the overwhelmingly textual focus of most
screen studies. This dominant analytic paradigm perhaps unconsciously
perpetuates a strongly Romanticised mode of analysis which Bourdieu
summarised as ‘the representation of culture as a kind of superior reality,
irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics, and the ideology of free,
disinterested “creation” founded on the spontaneity of innate inspiration’
(1993: 114). My aim with this book has been to steer an analytical course
between these two extremes. Contemporary literary adaptations are
products of an intricate, hugely complex institutional and industrial
system. Importantly, however, the adaptation industry not only stymies
the appearance of certain kinds of adaptations (as dour political econ-
omists tend to emphasise in keeping with their left-wing, economically
deterministic mode); it also facilitates the appearance of others –
including in the niche category of the arthouse literary adaptation with
which this study has been principally concerned. The adaptation industry
as a whole is both enabling as well as obstructive. Thus to appreciate
adaptation as an industrial, economic and above all sociological process
is not necessarily disillusioning – delegitimising our enjoyment of
adaptations – but, rather, enlightening. The model elaborated in this
study aims to highlight the processes facilitating the creation of certain
kinds of adaptations (focussing, for argumentative clarity, specifically
though not exclusively on adaptations between the book and screen
sectors). Secondly, the focus has been on industrial structures shifting in
186 Afterword
response to new patterns of audience enthusiasm (in imitation of other
agents’ successes for example) and for newly prominent media (such as
comics). Like all ecosystems, the adaptation industry functions according
to complex patterns of feedback and responsiveness, with changes in the
role and status of specific agents affecting the structure of the field as a
whole. Finally, pervasive throughout the present volume is the idea that
detailed modelling of the adaptation industry allows us to see how the
various contemporary media sectors are increasingly tightly converged
into a single adaptation-industry network through conglomerate owner-
ship structures, digital technologies and the ubiquity of the content rights
economy.
Within academe, the prevailing organisational logic has long been to
relegate specific media platforms to discrete fields of study, so that as each
new medium moved forward to challenge the printed book (hived off
as literary studies’ main stamping ground), new, rivalrous disciplines such
as film studies, television studies, digital media studies, computer-gaming
studies and the like emerged. Adaptation studies’ tentative appearance
in the 1950s predated, as has been outlined earlier, the emergence of
film studies as a distinct academic undertaking, and for many decades
the legacy of adaptation studies’ original academic liminality has plagued
it. Intellectually neither fish nor fowl, it seemed always hamstrung by its
insider-outsider status and was tolerated rather than embraced by
medium-specific disciplinary rivals. Yet with ownership and techno-
logically based distinctions between media platforms increasingly
redundant in the twenty-first century, the time is now surely ripe for adap-
tation studies to turn its characteristic border-dwelling into its primary
academic strength. If content is fluidly transferred across affiliate digitally-
enabled media platforms as a matter of course in the contemporary
cultural sphere, what is required is an explanatory framework for
understanding why and, specifically, how this occurs. Various ‘new-wave’
adaptation scholars have articulated similar arguments in promoting
adaptation studies as a discipline whose time has now come (as touched
upon in this book’s Introduction). But to date their overwhelming focus
on the semiotic richness of adapted texts and propounding of various
theoretical schemas for understanding these have distracted attention
from more sociologically focussed enquiries into how these various texts
come to be produced, and the multidirectional distribution routes they
subsequently take in accessing audiences. Contemporary adaptation is
a cultural phenomenon thoroughly intertwined with legal regimes, com-
mercial investments and status hierarchies between industry sectors
and the individual agents within them. My aim throughout this volume
has thus been not to castigate adaptations for being products of a
(predominantly) profit-seeking industry, but to bring balance into con-
temporary adaptation studies by holding together both the specificities of
adapted texts and their common adaptation context. Yes, adaptation is
 Afterword 187
clearly proliferating, but beneath the beguiling surface of individual
adaptation case studies lies an intricate institutional apparatus some
decades in development and of formidable and growing power. If
Dorothy and her companions wish to understand the newly disorienting
Oz in which they find themselves, they must first pay attention to how the
Wizard’s various levers, microphones and smoke machines actually
function.
The various stakeholders in the adaptation industry aim optimally for
synergistic success in which each agent with an interest in a particular
literary property benefits from its cross-promotion in other formats.
However, even in the case of such cross-format successes, the adaptation
industry is marked by intense competition, both over the extent of rights
controlled by specific agents, as well as claims of accreting or eroding the
cultural capital attaching to specific properties. Chapter 1 examined
the rise of the celebrity author figure as an authorising marker for
adaptations. Through both occasional cameo appearances within a screen
text, as well as publicity appearances in support of adapted texts, authors
have become more prominent in shepherding their works’ post-print
manifestations. The irony is that the Romantic charisma of the author,
which is here employed as guarantor of artistic integrity above and
beyond screen-industry machinations, has itself become incorporated into
the functions of the adaptation industry. The rise of the celebrity author
has been concomitant with the elevation of the literary agent as the
writer’s business manager and creative sounding-board. As explored in
Chapter 2, the agent’s usurpation of the editor’s former mentoring role
has led to an increasing instrumentalisation of the corporate publisher’s
function. Yet, in a further irony, literary agents themselves now appear to
be undergoing consolidation and conglomeration into cross-sectoral
talent agencies capable of representing a content package across all media
incarnations and throughout all phases of its commercial life. Interactions
between the book and screen worlds have occurred since the earliest
decades of the twentieth century, typically facilitated by agents, but
publishers are fighting back by attempting, as examined in Chapter 3, to
multiply the afterlives of book content through increasingly formalised
cross-industry contact at book fairs, film festivals and dedicated
adaptation industry fora. The proliferation of such staged events on the
adaptation industry calendar has formalised, regularised and catalysed
adaptations deal-making to the commercial benefit of all parties. Readers
too appear ecumenical about the exact media format and sequence in
which they encounter literary content, with adaptation-themed sessions
and film screenings now commonplace at writers’ festivals internationally.
The role of literary prizes in foregrounding ‘adaptation-ready’ books
has been apparent in the Anglophone world for some decades, but it is
only recently that administrators of major book awards have publicly
embraced their role as adaptation catalysers, citing the number of
188 Afterword
shortlisted books subsequently adapted as an indicator of a prize in touch
with the creative zeitgeist. Film-makers also attempt to cultivate audience
familiarity with a book’s prize-winning pedigree through a range of extra-
and intradiegetic devices, as explored in Chapter 4. However, in the case
of a semi-fictionalised historical account, a novel’s prize-winning status
may in fact burden a screen adaptation as much as it consecrates it. Those
agents most directly responsible for reimagining a book for the screen,
namely screenwriters, have until recently been comparatively ignored by
medium-specific academic disciplinary structures. Screenwriters’ liminal
positioning and attempts to reconcile competing demands upon them
from other adaptation industry stakeholders have manifested in polarised
screenwriterly rhetorics of radical dismemberment and textual reverence,
as outlined in Chapter 5. Intriguingly, the recent emergence of a seem-
ingly oxymoronic figure – the auteur adaptive screenwriter, whose name
acts as a badge of textual fidelity even while their actual practice radically
reconfigures print texts for the screen – may have reconciled the two
rhetorics, as well as providing an additional public persona to aid in the
promotion of adapted works. It is producers and, in particular, film
distributors who are responsible for choreographing publicity and
marketing campaigns around resulting film adaptations, and who thus
largely create public awareness of such products. Chapter 6 examines
the enthusiastic recruitment of author, author representative, publisher,
screenwriter, stars and director into marketing campaigns for literary
adaptations, especially in the arthouse niche market. While other elements
of the adaptation industry are readily pressed into service, distributors’
greater financial exposure ensures that, when push comes to shove, film
industry interests predominate; this is evident even to the extent of creating
hand-picked, literary-identified coterie audiences for early market-testing
of awards-aspirant films, in the hope of crossing over to the lucrative mass
market.

Fragility of the Rights Economy in the Twenty-first

Century
The examination of film distribution in Chapter 6 might suggest a docile,
tractable audience, herded into attending specific films at pre-determined
times, but this is not necessarily representative of all audience sectors in
relation to adaptation. Alongside the dominant formal adaptation-
industry economy examined in this volume, one characterised by trading
of IP rights and prestige in exchange for money, exists the adapta-
tion industry’s shadowy penumbra typified by audiences’ unauthorised
reuse of literary materials. Adaptation scholar I.Q. Hunter rightly
recognises that ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ adaptation obey no clear-cut distinc-
tions: ‘The perceived differences between exploitation and adaptation
are the products of, first, the cultural politics of legitimacy and, second,
 Afterword 189
the vicissitudes of copyright legislation’ (2009: 23). By the end of the first
decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that the formal adaptation
industry coexists and at its fringes intersects with an expanding realm of
unauthorised adaptation activities undertaken by digitally enabled
‘produsers’ who create and distribute amateur adaptations more out of a
fascination with particular texts than for personal profit.
The best known of such sectors revolves around fan fiction, formerly
an underground creative writing practice centred upon fan conventions
but now globally disseminated and archived via voluminous Internet
portals. The phenomenon raises the same kind of definitional questions
with which traditional textually-focussed adaptation studies has long
wrestled: to what extent can a fanfic prequel, sequel, parody or mash-up
be considered an adaptation? Clearly the answer to this, as new-wave
adaptation scholars have argued elsewhere in relation to degrees of
textual borrowing, is that adaptation encompasses a broad spectrum
of intertextual indebtedness. Some of these literary mash-ups are profes-
sionally published, such as Seth Grahame-Smith’s brilliantly packaged
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), a cross-genre splatter-fest which
has now spawned its own franchise of ‘Deluxe Heirloom Edition’,
audiobook, Kindle eBook, graphic novel, wall calendar and a feature film
currently in development – these latter incarnations being effected,
interestingly, through traditional adaptation industry rights-trading
channels.1 It is true that Jane Austen’s work has long been in the public
domain and could thus be considered legal fair game for textual
reworking. But fanfic also exists around contemporary texts and not only
in popular fiction genres, with fan fictions also reworking texts from
the literary end of the fiction scale. Rare innovative experiments such as
Remix My Lit, an Australia Council for the Arts-supported initiative,
have trialled mashing up of contemporary literary writers’ work with
authorial permission and under Creative Commons licence, subsequently
reprinting the original short stories and selected mash-ups in book form
(Barker, 2009; Murray, 2010).2 But more generally, the mainstream
book world has been largely silent on the implications of fan rewritings
of contemporary literary works, relegating fan fiction very much to a
copyright grey area (Tushnet, 1996; Jenkins, 2006; Rimmer, 2008;
Westcott, 2008; Van Parys, 2009).
If fan fiction appears less readily identifiable as adaptation because it
does not move out of the written medium of the source text, the
audiovisual nature of fan films distinguishes them as more immediately
recognisable trans-media adaptations. At one end of the fan film phenom-
enon are trailer edits where users working with domestic video-editing
software recut trailers or entire films to create alternative iterations of
familiar content. The YouTube-posted trailer edit of literary adaptation
Possession (2002), for example, echoes much critical commentary on the
film by omitting entirely the twentieth-century plot thread and focussing
190 Afterword
exclusively on the Victorian-era romance between A.S. Byatt’s Christina
Rossetti-like poet and Browning-esque man of letters.3 Less obviously
derivative is the genre of fan-made films, also long a feature of science
fiction and fantasy convention circuits but more recently accessible to
mass audiences via user-generated video-hosting websites. These range
from the shambolically, ludicrously amateur, through the quirky, to well-
developed and -produced short films (Jenkins, 2003; Basement, 2005;
Tedmanson, 2005). The high-water mark of the fan film to date is surely
Born of Hope (2009), an unauthorised Lord of the Rings prequel imagin-
ing the family back-story of Tolkien’s character Aragorn and remarkable
for its one-hour-plus running time, professional-quality production
design, digital special effects, costumes, sound and editing (Lamont,
2010).4 In addition to the phenomenon of the fan film, we might add
(semi-)authorised gaming adaptations of printed works. These range
from, at one end, often technologically primitive and deliberately goofy
games co-created with a book’s author and released online to build viral
publicity for a text. But, similar to fan film-making, these user-generated
games can increasingly take advantage of sophisticated game-creation
software to produce gaming adaptations with the potential not only to
create publicity for a printed text and its official adaptation franchise, but
perhaps also to cannibalise audiences for these.
What relationships can – and should – exist between the formal
economy of adaptation rights-trading, characterised by proliferating
subsidiary rights clauses in media industry contracts, and this shadow
economy of unlicensed, user-generated adaptations of wildly variable
quality and motivation? It is on this question that adaptation studies
intersects most directly with ongoing debates in media and cultural
studies over the implications of digitally empowered audience–creators.
Media corporations, viewing the trend with marked alarm, have tradi-
tionally taken the position that amateur adaptations potentially threaten
the brand integrity of specific media properties (especially in children’s
markets) and risk co-opting consumers of official adaptation products.
For these reasons, copyrights and trademarks should be vigorously
enforced through cease-and-desist notices and, if necessary, litigation
against infringers. However, fans angered by heavy-handed policing
of corporate properties have staged effective online protest campaigns and
boycotts which have generated damaging mass-media publicity, poten-
tially alienating precisely the core audience sector for official adaptation
products. Growing recognition of the counterproductiveness of corporate
IP-enforcement strategies has led some media organisations more recently
to take an at least superficially more collaborative approach, harnessing
the grassroots publicity generated by fan creations and attempting to
incorporate these partially into official pre-release marketing campaigns
(Murray, 2004b; Grainge, 2008: 139; Milner, 2009: 492). According to
this approach, fan creativity becomes categorised more as free research
 Afterword 191
and development labour and on-tap market research. But how do such
policies of turning a benevolent blind eye to fans’ unauthorised adapta-
tions fare once fans move out of the non-commercial realm, such as by
accepting paid advertising on websites attracting traffic with unauthorised
adapted content, or leveraging skills, contacts and showreels built
through participation in fan films into a career in the media industries
proper (Lamont, 2010)?
Issues such as these constitute the current front line of IP disputes
between brand-focussed and revenue-oriented conglomerate media, and
the mass creativity of individual audience members. They thus constitute
an exciting new frontier also for adaptation studies, as recognised by the
theme of the 2010 Association for Adaptation Studies conference in
Berlin: ‘Rewriting, Remixing and Reloading: Adaptations across the
Globe’.5 But it is salutary to recall, especially given cultural studies’ long
history of celebratory accounts of audience ‘resistance’, that the shadow
economy of unauthorised adaptation is highly unlikely to eclipse the
official adaptation industry any time soon, if only because of demon-
strable public appetite for the kind of high-budget production values, star
attachments and formal distribution and exhibition that only the studio
majors and their affiliates have the resources to secure. More realistically,
the question becomes: to what extent can the formal adaptation industry
and its unofficial penumbra coexist and even at their fringes intersect –
through tapping of emergent audience sectors, cultivation of new genres,
and hiring of promising fan talent? In all likelihood these two sectors of
the adaptation economy – the official and the black market – will resolve
themselves into an uneasy truce, with some overlap at the margins. Hence
adaptation scholars dazzled by the displays of anarchic, exuberant
creativity undoubtedly evident among web 2.0 hosting sites, should
temper their enthusiasm for semiotic analyses of fan creations with a
detailed understanding of the legal, institutional and commercial frame-
works against which such activities appear to rebel. After all, it is not
possible to appreciate fully the significance of user-generated adaptations
unless the discipline has first developed a clear understanding of the
formal adaptation mechanisms which such practices challenge, evade or
complement. What is equally clear, however, is that the formal adaptation
industry, only now beginning to be analysed, cannot be fully compre-
hended if quarantined off from users’ digital activities. These show every
indication of becoming more plentiful, more widely accessible and more
legally fraught as the twenty-first century progresses.
Notes

Introduction
1 The editors’ statement in the journal’s first issue makes Adaptation’s larger
disciplinary ambitions explicit: ‘[The journal’s] very presence is testimony to
the fact that adaptation studies has an important place in serious academic
debate and is a discipline in its own right’ (Cartmell, Corrigan and Whelehan,
2008: 4).
2 See Leitch, 2005; 2007b; 2008a.
3 In reference to the discipline of film studies as a whole, leading political
economist Janet Wasko makes a similar observation that the discipline has
overwhelmingly focussed on textual analysis rather than on issues of
economics and production – especially from a critical political economy
perspective (2003: 12–13). Wasko concludes that: ‘These oversights need to
be addressed if we are to understand film in its actual social context’ (13).
4 A full two decades before Naremore’s call for a sociology of adaptation
(quoted as an epigraph to this Introduction), Dudley Andrew similarly wrote
in his much revised and reprinted article ‘The Well-Worn Muse’: ‘It is
time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn’ (1980: 14; 2000,
[1984]: 35). However, on closer examination, Andrew’s conception of
‘sociology’ turns out to be neither industrial nor commercial in orientation
but residually textual: ‘we need to study the films themselves as acts of
discourse’ (17). It is in fact more akin to Stam’s and Hutcheon’s subsequently
articulated conceptions of adaptation as a discursive barometer for the social
and historical preoccupations of a given culture. Andrew’s statement about
a sociological turn in adaptation studies has been cited approvingly, though
not entirely accurately, by Karen E. Kline in her identification of a
‘materialist’ adaptation studies paradigm (one of four paradigms she
identifies as operative in the discipline) (1996: 74). Oddly, she expresses
dissatisfaction that materialist attention to ‘the commercial system within
which the film is produced’ encourages ‘formulaic’ neo-Marxist denuncia-
tions of adaptations as commercial corruptions of true (presumably literary)
art (74–75). It is not clear why attention to contextual factors should
necessarily adopt a Marxist perspective and denunciatory tone, and could not
instead be predominantly descriptive, or even go so far as to highlight how
production networks actually facilitate the adaptation of content from one
medium to others.
5 I’m deliberately invoking here cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s strongly
contextual understanding of art and literature (though never adaptation per
se) as cultural ‘field’: ‘In short, it is a question of understanding works of art
as a manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field,
 Notes 193
and all the determinisms inherent in its structure and functioning, are
concentrated’ (1993: 37; italics in original).
6 Thomas Leitch and Christine Geraghty have also separately critiqued Stam’s
demonising of Hollywood and his polarising of artistic worth and box-office
success as unduly binarised (2005: 236, 238; 2008: 10–11).
7 http://www.oscar.com/
8 Analysing the appropriability of Bourdieu’s theories for a specifically feminist
literary critique, Toril Moi makes a similar point. Moi insists that feminist
literary criticism, as a textually and discursively dominated discipline, needs
also to understand literature’s social and historical contexts of cultural
production: ‘feminist criticism fails in its political and literary task if it does
not study literature both at the level of texts and at the level of institutions
and social processes’ (1991: 1018). Like the epigraphs to this book, Moi
also approvingly cites British cultural sociologist Janet Wolff in support of
such a project to understand ‘the social aspects of cultural production’
(1018).
9 Bluestone reiterates this analogy of the novel as raw material later in
Chapter 1: ‘What happens . . . when the filmist undertakes the adaptation of
a novel, given the inevitable mutation, is that he does not convert the novel at
all. What he adapts is a kind of paraphrase of the novel – the novel viewed as
raw material’ (2003: 62).
10 The tenacity of fidelity critique within film reviewing is exemplified, for
example, by even internationally respected film critic David Stratton having
recourse to the trope in his review of Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation (2006)
of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir Running with Scissors (2002): ‘the faithful
filming of a book is virtually an impossibility, and the film version has, of
necessity, to be something different. The question to ask seems to be this: Is
the film faithful to the spirit, to the essence, of the book?’ (2007: 22).
11 Kamilla Elliott (2003) also incorporates much semiotic and formalist analysis
into her recent study of adaptation, although her work historicises ‘interart’
debates and cross-pollinates this earlier semiotic tradition with analytical
techniques derived from postmodernism and cultural studies (5).
12 That cross-media transfer of content need not necessarily invoke a textual
analysis methodology is demonstrated by a recent wave of research into the
material and institutional conditions of rights-trading and cross-promotion
between book publishing and the mediums of theatre, radio and film in the
first decades of the twentieth century (see Weedon, 1999; 2007a; 2007b;
Hammond, 2004; Adam, 2006).
13 Guerric DeBona in his Film Adaptation in the Hollywood Studio Era (2010)
employs similar vocabulary in terming this latest wave of research ‘revisionist
adaptation studies’ (2).
14 A partial exception here is Stam’s brief, half-page discussion of adaptation’s
relationship to the development of copyright law in the early twentieth-
century film industry (Stam and Raengo, 2005: 31). This tantalising hint
of the kind of issues a production-oriented adaptation criticism might illumi-
nate finds much fuller expression in DeBona’s analysis of the cultural politics
and production contexts operative upon a number of adaptations of
the Hollywood studio era (1934–51) (2010: 8). DeBona’s ‘materializing’
approach to adaptation studies has much in common with the present volume,
especially his ‘awareness of institutional and cultural politics as a dense
sociological web, interconnecting and defining the practice of film adaptation’
(6, 21). However, his historical reconstruction of studio-era production
contexts would, naturally, require radical amendment to account for the
much altered dynamics of the contemporary period.
194 Notes
15 There appears to be something about the previously glacial pace of theoretical
innovation in adaptation studies that causes critics to vent their frustration in
enumerated lists of ‘clichés’, ‘truisms’ or ‘fallacies’ currently plaguing the field
(see Larsson, 1982: 70; Leitch, 2003: 149; Hutcheon, 2006: 52–71; Cartmell,
Corrigan and Whelehan, 2008: 1–2).
16 Cited approvingly by Whelehan (1999: 6).
17 See, for example, Reynolds (1993: 16).
18 There are some promising signs that this consciously contrived false
dichotomy is finally being challenged. Film scholar Andrew Higson notes that
solitary authorial creation is merely ‘the conventional mythology of literary
authorship. . . . But of course the publishing business also plays its part, in the
guise of editors, marketing people, book designers, and so on, as does the
business of criticism, literary reviews, and the like’ (2006: 72). Similarly,
Cartmell and Whelehan (2007a) have recently called for adaptation studies to
pay attention to the ‘commercial considerations . . . [of] the film and television
industries’ in order better to understand the production contexts out of which
adaptations emerge (4, 9). But, curiously, they exempt the book publishing
industry from similar scrutiny. However, in a recent survey of ‘new-wave’
adaptation studies work published in the first issue of Adaptation, Leitch
indicates that this theoretical oversimplification is now being called into
question: ‘Is the movie subject to contextual pressures that inflect its
meanings? Of course it is. So is the book’ (2008a: 69). In the same issue of
Adaptation the current author undertakes an extended case-study example
of how such an industrially focussed research methodology might analyse
adaptation, taking into account both the book and screen industries (2008b).
19 Geraghty has also taken Stam to task for ‘ignoring the production contexts of
literature while emphasizing those of cinema and television’ (2008: 11).
Geraghty’s own book does not, however, investigate the impact of the book
business on the phenomenon of adaptation in any detail, adopting – as
mentioned earlier – a predominantly textual analysis methodology.
20 Tracy Chevalier, author of the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), made
this point forcefully during a panel on adaptations at the 2009 London Book
Fair (‘Book to Film Adaptations’, 2009). Outlining her own (fortuitous)
experience of the adaptation process, Chevalier noted that authors already
have extensive experience of ‘letting go’ of their text and working collab-
oratively through the production, marketing and publicity processes, as
well as through dealing with unanticipated interpretations of their work on
the part of readers. Interestingly, Chevalier also recounted that a proof copy
of her novel was shown by her literary agent to a film agent for potential
optioning, and that this film agent then passed it to one of his screenwriter
clients, thereby stoking the interest of several film producers – all prior to the
book’s publication. This is a relatively high-profile literary instance of the
increasingly common mass-market fiction practice of ‘pre-publication film
sales’ (explored further in Chapter 1). Indeed, large-scale international book
fairs such as London’s are now designed precisely to catalyse such rights-
trading between publishers, producers, screenwriters and literary scouts;
foregrounding this growing trend was presumably the impetus for convening
the ‘Book to Film Adaptations’ panel at which Chevalier spoke (see Chapter
3). Girl with a Pearl Earring is, of course, itself an adaptation or intertext of
Vermeer’s identically titled painting. Leitch provides a detailed textual
analysis of the book and film versions of Girl with a Pearl Earring in Chapter
8 of his Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, contextualising the pair as an
instance of the broader phenomenon of ‘streaming pictures’ – films based on
visual materials (2007a: 202–06).
 Notes 195
21 There are a handful of notable exceptions to this general view emerging from
the niche adaptations subfield of studying novelisations, e.g. Baetens (2007).
The subtitle of Baetens’s chapter, ‘Novelization, the Hidden Continent’,
aptly captures the currently hyper-marginalised nature of research into
novelisations.
22 Many critics have similarly noted screen adaptations’ role in driving increased
demand for the original novel: Ellis, 1982: 5; Izod, 1992: 97, 103; Orr, 1992:
1; Reynolds, 1993: 4, 10; Whelehan, 1999: 18 and Hutcheon, 2006: 90.
23 The ‘Adaptations, Cross-Media Practices and Branded Entertainments’ 2011
special issue of Convergence: International Journal of Research into New
Media Technologies also aims to spark broader critical engagement with these
issues (http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/callforpapers/crossmedia).
24 A rare and early exception to this general rule is John Orr, whose
‘Introduction: Proust, the Movie’ (1992) observes that (then) contemporary
literary novelists such as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, John Fowles, Milan
Kundera, Doris Lessing and Angela Carter were having their work adapted
for highly accomplished films (4–5). Orr suggests that, in a feedback effect,
these critically praised film adaptations in turn enhanced the literary
reputation of the novelist – a passing observation that the current volume aims
to test more fully.
25 Many critics have noted the role of screen adaptations of Austen’s works in
popularising and expanding readerships for her novels (for example, Lupack,
1999; Stern, 2000; Aragay and López, 2005; Troost, 2007).
26 This ecosystem model of the adaptation industry echoes another metaphor
borrowed from the biological sciences which has become increasingly
prominent within ‘new-wave’ adaptation studies work – the Darwinian sense
of ‘adaptation’ as fitness for a given environment. Linda Hutcheon has
invoked biologist Richard Dawkins’ related concept of ‘memes’ – ideas that
self-replicate across cultures and historical periods – as productive for a theory
of adaptation as intertextual citation (2006: 31–32; Bortolotti and Hutcheon,
2007: 446–47). Spike Jonze’s inclusion of a Charles Darwin figure in a brief
sequence of his much-commented-upon film Adaptation (2002), as well as the
film’s various time-lapse sequences of the natural world, may have encouraged
the efflorescence of such biological analogies in contemporary adaptation
studies (Hutcheon, 2004: 108; 2006: 2; 2007; Stam and Raengo, 2005: 1–3;
Sanders, 2006: 158; Leitch, 2007a: 257; Tomasulo, 2008: 165–66; Price,
2010: 62). Equally, Jonze’s dizzyingly inventive film might almost serve as an
unexpected (and presumably unintentional) manifesto for a new, industry-
focussed wave of academic adaptation studies due to its satirical attention to
the intermeshing motivations and anxieties of screenwriters, authors, agents,
directors, actors, producers and scriptwriting gurus. Articles about adaptation
featured in the book and screen trade press, as well as broadsheet newspapers’
culture supplements, now also routinely refer to the film as an insight into a
little-analysed sector of cross-media trade (Wyndham, 2005a; 2005b), and
were in fact doing so even prior to the film’s official release (Maas, 2001).
27 The Booker Prize was established in 1969, and became the Man Booker Prize
in 2002 with a change of sponsor (refer: http://www.themanbookerprize.co).
28 See Reynolds (1993) for the first, to my knowledge, use of this phrase in
adaptation studies criticism: ‘The huge growth over the last few years in what
could be called the adaptation industry makes this a cultural phenomenon
that cannot be ignored’ (11).
29 This expanded range of media interests was also evident at the Association
of Adaptation Studies’ 2009 annual conference at the British Film Institute
in London, which included panel sessions on adapting comic books and
196 Notes
computer games – topics seen as disciplinary growth areas by the membership
(http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/humanities/adaptations/adaptations-studies-
conference-2009.jsp).
30 Stam and Hutcheon, both of whom trained in North American comparative
literature programmes, are notable exceptions to this rule; both critics’ work
on adaptation references a wide variety of texts from (mostly) other European
language groups, in particular French-, Spanish-, Italian- and Portuguese-
speaking cultures (see Stam, 2005a; Hutcheon, 2006).

1 What Are You Working On?: The Expanding Role of the Author in
an Era of Cross-media Adaptation
1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCXdN7maB4I.
2 cf. Deborah Cartmell, Timothy Corrigan and Imelda Whelehan’s contention
that literary studies’ ‘romance with the author’ and ‘fetishization of individual
genius’ has inhibited the growth of adaptation studies (2008: 2). There is some
truth in this, although I would argue that the cult of the author has thrived
within adaptation studies as well, a ploy perhaps adopted to help boost the
field’s legitimacy in the eyes of normally suspicious literary studies colleagues.
3 Australian author Robert Drewe also endorses Hemingway’s advice, alluding
to it as his ‘take-the-money-and-run view of the [adaptation] process’ (Phelan,
2005: 86).
4 A slight variation on this marginalising of the writer can be heard in
actor–director Tim Roth’s reported comments at the second Forum
International Cinéma et Littérature (FICL): ‘A writer is really the last person
you want to see on the set, even the great ones. . . . While we’re collaborating
on a screenplay, I always tell them, “This is the time to enjoy yourself, because
once we start saying Action, it’s over!”’ (Goodman, 2002: 14). For more on
the FICL and its competitor events, see Chapter 3.
5 Michel Foucault makes the point that even self-proclaimedly ‘textually’
focussed schools of literary criticism, which ostensibly castigate focus on the
author as intentionalist fallacy, nonetheless constantly invoke the Romantic
ideal of the Author as superior creative being and locus of (attributed)
meaning in their very definition of what counts as a ‘work’ (2006: 282).
Also writing in broadly post-structuralist vein, Andrew Wernick evinces
embarrassment in even raising the subject in an academic essay of authors’
commercial profile: ‘The theme I want to bring to the surface is not easy to
introduce, for it concerns the most banal, grubby and self-interested side of
the writing process’ (1993: 87). Indeed, Wernick’s chapter is pervaded by
unease with commodity culture’s impact on the book trade (as though the
West had ever experienced print culture beyond the market). He even speaks,
curiously, of late-twentieth-century book culture in lapsarian terms as
‘the fallen condition of writing’ (102). Such remarks stand at the logical end-
point of mainstream literary studies’ long-propounded dematerialisation of
literature and elevation of the book as aesthetic creation over its properties as
physical commodity.
6 See Eisenstein, 1979; Rose, 1993; Johns, 1998.
7 See, for example, Foucault’s description of ‘our era of industrial and bourgeois
society, of individualism and private property’ now [in 1969] at the point of
fracturing ‘given the historical modifications that are taking place’ (291).
8 Scholar of the contemporary book industry Sarah Brouillette for this reason
rightly regards authors as ‘now thoroughly organised as a self-conscious class
of quasi-professionals’ (2007: 54).
9 This idea of the late twentieth century witnessing a second wave of authorial
 Notes 197
professionalisation (or, more accurately, the latest developments in a long-
running trend towards greater authorial professionalisation) is captured in
industry overviews such as that given by UK literary agent Antony Harwood:
‘what the industry has been going through for the last 20 or 30 years is
becoming increasingly professional and business-like’ (2008).
10 The probable reasons for this analytical lacuna are complex. Most scholars of
celebrity author culture are trained in literary studies and are therefore
predisposed to privilege print culture texts. Even when exposure to the theo-
retical schemata and methodological approaches of book history has provided
such scholars with the tools for elaborating upon paratextual and contextual
issues, there is still a lingering unease evident about placing literary texts
within the same conceptual space as other (newer) media. Of course, the
reasons for this may also be institutional, individual career-based and tightly
inflected by (inter-)disciplinary politics. The field of adaptations studies, on
the other hand, is ipso facto at ease with both print and screen media but it
has to date tended, as outlined in this volume’s Introduction, to fight shy of
contextual approaches, preferring to stage detailed interpretive readings
of specific texts.
11 The UK book industry’s acknowledged authority on rights, Lynette Owen,
confirms that ‘licensing prospects for a book may be discussed long before a
contract is signed with the author’ (1992: 43). Owen further observes that
‘increasing consolidation of publishers into large groups is undoubtedly
affecting rights policy, in that many houses now seek to acquire rights that
would otherwise have been licensed outside’, with the synergistic aim of
exploiting ‘as many aspects of a property as possible “within the family” ‘
(1992: 53; 58).
12 These phenomena are explored further in Chapter 5.
13 Jefferis, 1995: 5.
14 Dramatic rights can be a deal-breaker issue in author–publisher negotiations,
with publishers often keen to obtain them and authors’ agents invariably
insisting they be excluded from the publishing contract (Raftos, 2008; Inglis,
2008; Harwood, 2008). Australian literary agent Lyn Tranter states: ‘I’d be
very surprised if any agent ever gave the film rights to a publisher’ as, after all,
‘they’re not filmmakers’ (Tranter, 2008). Agents are especially vigilant in
policing the blurred boundaries between digital rights (which are often ceded
to the publisher) and dramatic rights (which typically are not). For example,
any digital book animation of a character veers – from the agent’s point of
view – dangerously close to dramatic adaptation and hence may jeopardise
separate pitching of the material to dramatic adaptors such as Hollywood
studios whose contracts insist upon all dramatic and merchandising rights
being transferred (Harwood, 2008). Harwood states that ‘I, as an agent, have
to keep . . . dramatic rights absolutely squeaky clean’.
15 Matthew Reilly, Australian author of a number of high-octane, techno-
logically oriented, mass-market thrillers, reports significant interest from
computer-game companies in adapting his novels (Phelan, 2005: 231; see also
Waldren, 2002). From the agent’s point of view, it is essential that any gaming
rights licensed to the publisher do not jeopardise potential sale of film rights
in a book, as Hollywood studios of any scale typically insist upon exclusive
dramatic and computer-gaming rights, the better to pursue corporate
synergies. Australian book and screen industries agent Rick Raftos navigates
this quandary by granting publishers rights to produce a game based on a
book for use on a website promoting that book, but reserving rights to create
stand-alone electronic games to the author for potential film sale (Raftos,
2008).
198 Notes
16 Lynette Owen indicates in the fifth edition of her vade mecum, Selling Rights,
how complex film producers’ motivations may be in acquiring book rights: ‘It
has been known for film companies to acquire rights in a book in order to use
only the title, or to use the personality of one character from the story in the
context of a very different plot, or even to keep the property off the market
and prevent anyone else from basing a competing film on it’ (2006: 260).
The book trade press reveals that such practices are indeed occurring;
Publishers Weekly in 2001 reported on the sale by an ICM agent to screen
producers of rights to a book’s title and an individual chapter (Maas, 2001:
28).
17 This is a familiar adage not only in publishing but across the creative
industries generally. Mark Bide also observes that, ‘When it comes to rights
negotiations, publishers are typically exhorted to “acquire broadly, license
narrowly”’ (1999: 71).
18 Industry parlance increasingly prefers the less hierarchical term ‘co-agent’ to
the formerly standard ‘sub-agent’ (Harwood, 2008).
19 Viewing book-to-film content traffic from the opposite direction, Variety
correspondent Chris Petrikin refers to the growth of subsidiary rights in books
with an equally memorable phrase: ‘the writer-as-cottage-industry’
phenomenon (1998a: 53).
20 The role and impact of literary agents on the adaptation industry are explored
in greater detail in Chapter 2.
21 UK literary agent Julian Friedmann, who specialises in screen rights deals,
particularly emphasised this point in his seminar on the relationships between
the book and screen industries at the 2008 London Book Fair: ‘You need to
be in a position to exploit the rights rather than put them on a shelf and not
exploit them’. He advises literary agents to ensure that screen iterations of
content, especially those distributed digitally, actively cross-promote book
versions: ‘Try and make sure that the film, whether it gets seen online, whether
it gets seen on phones, whether it gets seen on television, or indeed maybe even
theatrically, does whatever it can to help sales of the book’ (Friedmann, 2008).
22 http://www.forum-cinema-ecriture.com/.
23 The key forum for such scouting activities is the annual international circuit
of leading book fairs attended by publishers, agents, retailers and –
increasingly – by representatives of other media industries, as investigated in
Chapter 3 (Bing, 2000; Meza, 2004).
24 For example, Hollywood producer Dede Gardner of Plan B Entertainment has
spoken of receiving publisher galley proofs of Mariane Pearl’s memoir A
Mighty Heart (2003), ‘along with everyone else in Hollywood, shortly before
it was published’ (‘A Mighty’, 2007). Whether such proof copies are
circulated directly by the publisher, or leaked and selectively disseminated by
scouts, is a hot-button issue in the adaptation industry, as noted below.
25 Thriller writer John Grisham was reportedly so furious over leaking to scouts
of a draft version of his novel The Rainmaker that he (temporarily) called off
the film rights sale process (Fleming, 1995b). Then again, for some publisher
clients, obtaining slipped manuscripts is precisely the reason to employ a
scout. Dan Franklin, publishing director of Jonathan Cape (UK), in a piece
aimed principally at an academic literary studies readership cheerfully reveals:
‘A scout’s job is to notify his or her client publishers of important or exciting
books and, better still, to obtain a copy of the manuscript before it is officially
submitted’ (2002: 273).
26 Publishers Weekly has a rhetorically overheated though undeniably fasci-
nating exposé of this world of scouts, agents and publishers engaged in
complex plays of bluff and double-bluff: ‘The business of selling books to
 Notes 199
Hollywood . . . is straightforward in appearance only. Simmering below the
surface is a reality far more Byzantine, rife with moles and secret deals and
clandestine alliances. Quite often, the book itself is secondary to the events
surrounding it’ (Maas, 2001: 25).
27 A book’s filmic potential is highly persuasive for commissioning editors; Dan
Franklin lists amongst his key criteria in considering a manuscript that he
be ‘convinced that this novel is exceptional, that it might win a prize or be
bought by a film producer, and that the author has a very considerable career
ahead of him or her’ (2002: 276). If film rights in a manuscript are sold
while it is still under consideration this causes ‘everyone to look at the book
in a completely different light’ (277). Claire Squires also notes publishers’
preference for incorporating into cover blurbs quotes from reviewers suggest-
ing ‘the novel’s filmic qualities’, as though to persuade casual bookshop
browsers that they will be getting in on the ground level of a content franchise
that will soon become mass-market via cinema or television adaptation (2007:
83). These empirical examples substantiate Jan Baetens’ more theoretical
contention that, in contemporary culture, ‘the book is read in relation to the
cinema, from which it now derives its status and its legitimation, both in
the case of a novel already adapted and in the case of a book that only has the
potential of being adapted’ (2005: 56).
28 For example, bankable thriller writer Dean Koontz’s novel The Husband was
optioned for film before the book had been completed (Trachtenberg, 2007).
Similarly, much-adapted author John Grisham’s title The Pelican Brief was
conceived with Julia Roberts in mind for the lead role, and the screen rights
facilitating this were sold prior to the book being written (Boozer, 2008: 8).
By contrast, established, but not quite brand-name, British author Deborah
Moggach recalls the excitement of film rights to her novel Tulip Fever (1999)
being snapped up while still at proof stage by Steven Spielberg for Dream-
Works, narrowly pipping Ridley Scott and other interested international
directors: ‘Within a few days I was flying out to Hollywood. It was thrilling
beyond words that my story about art, adultery and tulip trading was going
to be made into a movie’ (2005; 2008). In the event, the film of Tulip Fever
was cancelled shortly before the start of filming because changes to British tax
legislation made the US ‘runaway’ production uneconomical (2005; 2008). In
further evidence of the extent to which the book and film industries have
merged, novelist and screenwriter Moggach initially conceived her highly
visual story of an artist in the Dutch Golden Age as a screenplay, but then
(presciently, as it turned out) wrote it as a novel because ‘a novel exists forever
and a film may not get made’ (2008).
29 Donadio, 2005: 27.
30 British agent Julian Friedmann, of the Blake Friedmann Literary, TV and Film
Agency, advises screenwriter clients to work on screenplay and prose versions
of a story idea simultaneously, although for slightly different reasons. He
states that if both versions already exist a film producer buying the script is
also legally obliged to option the novel, thus ensuring two payments for the
writer – and, of course, two cuts of commission for their agent (Friedmann,
2009). Cultural theorist Jan Baetens, writing about intermedial transfer of text
in the twenty-first-century environment, notes an increase in authors writing
‘less with the intention of being read than with the aim of being adapted to
film’, the screenplay and its filmic realisation being held to be ‘the only thing
that really counts’ (2005: 56).
31 Writing a decade after Love Story, screenwriting expert William Miller
advises his readers that, ‘until recently, a beginning writer who wrote a good
original screenplay was well-advised to write his screenplay into the form of
200 Notes
a novel and have it published somewhere – holding his script in reserve ready
to submit if a producer showed interest in the book. . . . Major studio story
departments review novels – often in the galley-proof stage – ready to option
any promising property’ (1980: 210).
32 Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan also worked simultaneously on novel
and screenplay versions of his The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1998;
1998), although he has claimed that the constraints and opportunities
presented by the different media made the two versions more dissimilar than
similar (Bradley, 2005: 16).
33 The film has also had an effect on tourism in California’s wine country, a
trend about which Pickett has mixed feelings: ‘I started going to Santa Ynez,
a little community that was really undiscovered. . . . It was a place to go and
lick the wounds of all the travails I was going through. But now they have
Sideways bus tours and stuff. It’s crazy’ (Burkeman, 2005: 6).
34 The important role played by Newmarket Press and other screenplay
publishers in the adaptation economy is explored further in Chapter 5.
35 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404203/fullcredits#cast
36 http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0323325/
37 Adaptation scholar Andrew Higson also notes this example (2006: 62).
Intriguingly, in Helen Fielding’s first Bridget Jones book it is fellow Granta
Best Young British Novelist alumnus Julian Barnes who smiles with ‘thin-but-
attractive’ lips in response to Bridget’s publishing-party faux pas (1996: 99).
Presumably Rushdie’s post-fatwa global notoriety and the consequent
familiarity of his image made him the more appropriate choice for the film’s
British production company, Working Title Films. Nevertheless, Barnes also
makes an uncredited appearance in the film as himself (http://www.imdb.com/
title/tt0243155/fullcredits#cast).
38 Smith is also credited on the production as creative consultant (http://www.
imdb.com/title/tt0334877/fullcredits#cast).
39 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274558/fullcredits#cast
40 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120255/fullcredits#cast
41 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124315/fullcredits#cast
42 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084917/fullcredits#cast
43 Davies also used his time on set during Candy’s Sydney-based production to
shoot a yet to be released documentary about the filming entitled Diary of a
Milkman (Wyndham, 2005a; 2005b: 8; Davies, 2006: 10–11).
44 Further instances of authorial cameos, and analysis of their cultural and
commercial significance, are contained in Chapter 4.
45 Regrettably, Moggach’s cameo in The Diary of Anne Frank also fell by the
wayside, being edited out of the final version (Moggach, 2008).
46 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/fullcredits#cast
47 A poll of 7,600 viewers on The Internet Movie Database had rated Love in
the Time of Cholera 6.2 out of 10 at the time of writing (http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0484740/).
48 A poll of 47,397 viewers on The Internet Movie Database had rated
Perfume 7.5 out of 10 at the time of writing (http://www.imdb.com/title/
tt0396171/). Both Süskind and his publishers also did well out of Perfume’s
screen adaptation: ‘Anne Messitte, publisher of Vintage Books [US], one
of Bertelsmann’s paperback imprints, says sales of Patrick Suskind’s [sic]
“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” jumped to more than 100,000 copies
sold from 13,000 copies annually after the movie of the same name was
released in 2006’ (Trachtenberg, 2007: W6).
 Notes 201
2 World Rights: Literary Agents as Brokers in the Contemporary
Mediasphere
1 This chapter – in keeping with the present volume as a whole – confines its
analysis to Anglophone countries because of the markedly different profile of
agents in other linguistically demarcated territories. For example, the French
book world has long operated on the basis of direct author–publisher
negotiations, as recently as the mid 1990s decrying the literary agent as a
distastefully American import – ‘not . . . “une practique française”’ (Cloonan
and Postel, 1997: 796; Delany, 2002: 209, n.47; Tonkin, 2008). New York-
based literary agent Andrew Wylie has in recent years moved to challenge
France’s arguably paternalistic, publisher-dominated status quo by wooing
several prominent French authors – including a pre-presidential Nicholas
Sarkozy – to sign with The Wylie Agency and thus to reduce the ‘insularity’
of the French literary world (Taylor, K., 2007; Grove, 2007).
2 Rubinstein, 1975: 2358.
3 See http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005& context
=slej. Winterson is in addition, however, a client of the William Morris
Agency, London (see http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.
asp?PageID=217).
4 Prominent British agent Ed Victor summarises the three-way author–agent–
publisher dynamic thus: ‘I’m the one who kicks ass; they [authors] don’t,
because they’re adorable. But they want me to kick ass’ (Dowling, 2004).
5 To provide only a single representative example, Lyn Tranter of Australian
Literary Management (ALM), one of Australia’s leading and longest-
established agencies, speaks of receiving in excess of 1000 uncommissioned
manuscripts during 2004 and accepting only three (Michael, 2005: 13). When
interviewed by myself in 2008, both Tranter’s volume of submissions and the
proportion accepted had remained unchanged (Tranter, 2008). ALM has
since closed its books to new authors unless recommended by an existing
client. ALM’s website encapsulates agents’ desperation-induced hard-line
response to this tsunami of unsolicited submissions, stating bluntly, ‘We
do not consider scripts of any kind, or children’s books[,] by unpublished
authors’ (http://www.austlit.com/about-alm.html). Encountering such rebuffs,
the source of would-be authors’ Catch 22-style frustrations becomes obvious.
6 The former industry standard commission of 10 per cent has increasingly
given way to a stock 15 per cent commission on local territory deals, with 20
per cent commissions typical for translation, film and other co-agented deals
(Dowling, 2004; Raftos, 2008; Harwood, 2008).
7 Lyn Tranter observes of industry body the Australian Literary Agents’
Association (ALAA) that ‘the agents who belong to the association are all
women’ (2008). Seehttp://austlitagentsassoc.com.au/members.html.
8 This sentiment was almost universal amongst literary agents interviewed for
this project (Tranter, 2008; Inglis, 2008; Harwood, 2008).
9 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/agencies/termsandconditions/
litag/
10 http://www.frankfurt-book fair.com/en/fbf/agencies/termsandconditions/agents
centre_film_tv/
11 Andrew Wylie quoted in Barber, 1999: 12.
12 Kavanagh died in October 2008 (Callil, 2008; Tonkin, 2008).
13 Wylie’s nickname appears to derive from his alleged tendency to ‘poach’
already established authors whose careers have been ‘nurtured’ by other
agents, rather than ‘breaking out’ unknown writers himself (Tranter, 2008).
The example of Wylie’s representation of first-time novelist Chloe Hooper,
202 Notes
outlined below, does however complicate this picture. Agent Antony
Harwood also rightly points out the curiously passive and infantilising
conception of authors connoted by the verbs ‘poach’ and ‘nurture’ (2008).
Wylie’s notoriety and his epithet ‘the Jackal’ have even generated fictional
parallels: Canadian publisher Anna Porter’s crime novel The Bookfair
Murders (1997) centres upon the murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair of the
ruthlessly hard-bargaining New York literary agent Andrew Myles, dubbed
‘the Jackal’ by his opponents in the book trade because ‘he’d found it much
easier to wait until someone was already established and then go pluck them
off the tree’ (163; 109). The importance of Frankfurt as an annual microcosm
of global publishing is explored in detail in Chapter 3.
14 Amis in his memoir Experience (2000) records that he was at the time
suffering from a mouth tumour requiring removal of one jaw’s worth of teeth
and multiple painful procedures, making allegations of ‘fritter[ing] a lot of
[the advance] away on cosmetic dentistry’ particularly unjustified (210).
15 It is also true to say that Amis’s most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow
(Cape, 2010), is being hailed in some quarters as a return to authorial form.
16 The first mention of the term ‘superagent’ I have come across dates from an
illuminating 1979 Publishers Weekly survey article (Holt, 1979: 134–38). But
the term (and its variants ‘super agent’, ‘super-agent’ etc.) became increasingly
familiar throughout 1980s restructurings of the book industries, reaching a
crescendo at the decade’s close (McDowell, 1989: C26; Gabriel, 1989: 62;
Mayer, 1989: 1). It is also interesting how closely intertwined the careers of
Meredith, Janklow and Klebanoff have been, particularly given the size of the
US book market: Klebanoff was hired by Janklow’s law-firm-cum-literary-
agency Morton L. Janklow Associates in 1972, and became a partner in 1978
(Klebanoff, 2002). In 1983 Klebanoff set up independently as a literary agent,
and subsequently acquired Meredith’s long-established literary agency after
the founder’s death in 1993 (Klebanoff, 2002: 1; 29; 96). Richard Curtis,
another New York City literary agent of similarly high profile was, in
addition, an employee of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the late 1950s
(Baker, 1999: 62).
17 This suggestion of life imitating art is made all the stronger when, early in the
novel, the following exchange takes place between the rival writers: ‘that
morning, he had found a long piece about how Gwyn Barry had switched
agents, controversially taking his custom from Harley, Dexter, Fielding to Gal
Aplanalp.
“She’s already got me a huge deal on my next one.”
“You haven’t finished your next one.”
“Yeah but they like to do these things earlier now. It’s a campaign. It’s like
a war out there. World rights”’(1995: 59).

It is entirely possible, however, that this roman-à-clef exchange was inserted

into the manuscript’s final draft after the controversy about Amis’ own move
from PFD to Wylie as a further authorial wink at reviewers and readers.
18 Established in 1975, the UK’s Association of Authors’ Agents (AAA) is the
industry group representing Britain’s literary agents. Prominent in its Code of
Practice is the requirement that ‘No member shall knowingly represent the
client of another agency, whether or not that other agency is a member of the
Association. Failure to enquire as to a client’s agency relationship shall be
considered a violation of this rule’ (Rule 6(b)). The Wylie Agency, although it
has a highly active office in London, is not listed on the AAA’s online
Directory of Members (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.php/Welcome).
 Notes 203
19 Chief amongst such publishers virulently objecting to the ‘parasitic’ presence
of the literary agent were William Heinemann and Henry Holt (see West,
1988a: 79; 1988b; Bonn, 1994; Delany, 2002).
20 Antony Harwood, a former colleague of Wylie’s at Gillon Aitken Associates
(now Aitken Alexander) in London in the mid 1980s, attributes the UK
reaction to the Wylie/Amis controversy to ‘the Brits consider[ing] it vulgar for
artists – writers – to earn good money. That’s all it was about. It wasn’t a
record-breaking deal by any means. But he was a literary writer and they
hated that. They wanted him starving in a garret not burning half a million
for a couple of books’ (2008).
21 For all Wylie’s insistence that he represents only top-quality writing,
foregrounded by the roll-call of illustrious authors’ names on The Wylie
Agency’s website, the firm also represents some rather more mass-market
authors such as business figures William H. Gates, Sr and Larry Ellison, as
well as celebrities known principally for activities outside of literature
including Lou Reed, Annie Leibovitz and Tipper Gore. The Wylie Agency also
represents organizations such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation
Inc. (http://www.wylieagency.com/CLIENT%20LIST.htm). The role of
awards such as the (Man) Booker Prize in consecrating ‘Literature’ – and
literary adaptations – is explored in detail in Chapter 4.
22 Dan Franklin, publishing director of Jonathan Cape (UK), also emphasises
how interrelated the two dominant centres of the English-language book trade
have become, where ‘major London publishing houses . . . have sister
companies in America’ and thus can be keenly aware of and considering
purchasing a novel being auctioned in New York even before that auction is
over (2002: 272).
23 Andrew Wylie: ‘What we’re trying to do is represent writers seamlessly
around the world, so that the same principles that are brought to their work
in the home territories are applied outside’ (Bockris, 1999).
24 Dan Franklin in 2002 published the book chapter ‘Commissioning and
Editing Modern Fiction’ in which he describes the auction process sur-
rounding an anonymised book which is surely Hooper’s A Child’s Book of
True Crime: ‘Novel A was a first novel by a young Australian woman, a
recent graduate of a well-known creative writing course in the United States
taught by a prominent American novelist whose books are on the Cape list
[as are Roth’s]. It was being sold by one of the very best literary agents in
New York, who had told me about it six months earlier at the Frankfurt
Book Fair’ and who ‘intended to sell the English language rights in three
separate territories’ (270–71). Interestingly, Franklin quotes directly from the
submission letter that the agent sent with the manuscript, evoking Wylie’s
characteristic take-no-prisoners ‘negotiating’ tone: ‘If you are interested in
publishing, we would ask you to submit your offer . . . by the end of the day
on Tuesday, February 27. On Wednesday 28 and Thursday 1 March [the
author] will meet with the publishers who have presented the four best offers;
and we’ll make a decision on Friday 2 March’ (271). Franklin concludes his
anecdote by stating that Cape acquired the novel in question with a bid that
was ‘unquestionably higher than would have been the case in a conventional
auction’ (274).
25 h t t p : / / w w w . w a l k l e y s . c o m / w i n n e r s / 2 0 0 6 / w i n n e r s / h o o p e r . h t m l ;
http://www.penguin.com.au/lookinside/spotlight.cfm?SBN=9780241015377
26 Flanagan’s spirited overview of the strengths and challenges of Australia’s
book industry was widely reported in Australian cultural-sphere media at the
time, and has since been (re)published in both the Australian Society of
Authors’ (ASA) publication Australian Author and David Carter and Anne
204 Notes
Galligan’s collection of print culture essays, Making Books: Contemporary
Australian Publishing (2007).
27 http://www.readings.com.au/interview/steve-toltz
28 This twenty-first-century trend for Australian authors to contract with
overseas agents stands in marked contrast to the advice Australian Author
magazine offered writers as recently as 1991: ‘Unless you happen to travel
abroad a lot and have lots of time to woo the overseas prima donnas, it is best
to concentrate on the Australian agents, most of whom have good overseas
associates’ (Barker, 1991: 16). Publishing academic Jenny Lee cites Australian
Society of Authors statistics indicating a similarly internationalist trend,
even amongst writers with Australian-based agents: in 1991, only 5 per cent
of Australian literary agents’ clients had overseas book contracts, whereas by
2001 some 20 per cent did, rising to as much as 30 per cent at some agencies
(2007: 28).
29 It is interesting that, in all of the furore in the Australian book trade over
splitting of Australian and New Zealand rights from ‘Commonwealth rights’,
no Australian commentators questioned the implicitly imperialist attitude this
represents on the part of Australian publishers towards the (admittedly small)
New Zealand market.
30 This is a common criticism of agents insisting upon large advances for
author–clients: ‘Authors that [sic] demand very high advances may find it
harder to get a publisher the next time round and be damaging her or his
career in the long term. In theory the agent should take the long-term view,
but this is not always the case’ (Look, 1999: 16).
31 For demographic, cultural and perhaps environmental reasons that are open
to speculation, Australia has long been British publishers’ most lucrative
export market – ‘ very much the jewel in the British bulldog’s crown’ (Munro
and Curtain, 2006: 3; Owen, 1992: 54; Nile, 2002: 29; Rosenbloom, 2008c:
176). However, this role may now be coming under pressure from the rising
profile of Anglophone Indian markets as a result of the increasing affluence of
the demographically vast Indian middle classes.
32 It is no coincidence that Adelaide Writers’ Week has, since 1998, played
occasional host to the Australia Council’s Visiting International Publishers
(VIP) programme, designed to increase foreign rights sales for Australian
books (see: http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about_us/artform_boards/
literature_board/australian_literature_abroad). Hence several high-profile UK
publishers could have been expected to be – and in fact were – in the audience
for Rosenbloom’s intentionally inflammatory speech (Inglis, 2008). The
slightly amended text of Rosenbloom’s address was subsequently republished
on his blog (2008b) with the subtitle ‘Perfidious Albion’ (http://www.scribe
publications.com.au/blog/territorialrightsandwrongsakaperfidiousalbion) and
in the US-based journal Publishing Research Quarterly’s Australian-themed
issue (2008). The piece additionally sparked ‘spirited debate’ at the 2008
London Book Fair (Rosenbloom, 2008c: 175).
33 Other literary agents also prefer to split off Australia/New Zealand and
Canadian rights from British Commonwealth and US territories respectively
in order to ensure a title is published with maximum enthusiasm and attention
in each territory, rather than simply being dutifully distributed in branch-
office fashion for a head office elsewhere. There is also the likelihood of
deriving greater income from four territorial rights deals as opposed to two;
but ‘it’s not just about the money, of course; I think the book will be better
published’ (Harwood, 2008).
34 For further analysis of Text’s role in debates over contemporary cultural flows
see Murray, 2008b.
 Notes 205
35 http://www.wylieagency.com/
36 Paul Delany makes a similar point about the transnational nature of the
contemporary literary marketplace: ‘For books, . . . regardless of where they
are written or read, bestsellers are made in London and New York, as surely
as film stars are now made in Hollywood and only there’ (2002: 190–91).
Graham Huggan has also written scathingly about the (Man) Booker Prize’s
colonialist ideological underpinnings whereby ‘Commonwealth’ writing is
judged worthy and consecrated by the imperial centre (1997).
37 British author Nick Hornby (a former PFD, now United Agents, client) on the
PFD/United Agents conflict (Armitstead and Chittenden, 2007: 8).
38 The stated number of agents resigning across PFD’s literary and talent
divisions ranges in media commentary from a low of six (Marsh, 2007: 4) to
a maximum of 85 (Cadwalladr, 2007: 4). The stories from which these
estimates are taken were published over three weeks apart, which accounts
for some – but not all – of the discrepancy in numbers as PFD’s woes
escalated.
39 Thomas Leitch discusses cross-format brands such as Lara Croft: Tomb
Raider and Japanese children’s franchise Pokémon as designed specifically for
maximum repurposing: ‘The ultimate purpose of this confluence of genres is
a marketing synergy that will boost the stock of the film, the game, and any
possible sequels and spin-offs’ (2007a: 272–73). Such analysis is familiar in
political economy studies of popular media, but has – as Leitch points out –
been almost entirely absent from literary discussions, suggesting the largely
aestheticist discipline’s unease with economically based frames of analysis
(274, 279).
40 Books are Different was the title of an influential 1966 publication recounting
the 1962 legal defence of the retail price maintenance policy enshrined in the
UK’s Net Book Agreement (NBA). Legal counsel for the British book industry
successfully argued in the case that the NBA was exempt from the provisions
of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1956 on the grounds that ‘books are
different’ from other consumer items because of their cultural importance (see
Feather, 1988: 190–91). The NBA subsequently crumbled in late 1995 when
various bookselling chains flouted its publisher-stipulated prices and began
mass-discounting of certain loss-leading titles (see Nile, 2002: 34; Finkelstein
and McCleery, 2005: 130; Todd, 2006: 20–21).
41 There is a history of tensions between literary and other divisions of
consolidated, cross-sectoral agencies. In the late 1980s, the film and television
division at ICM (US) voiced resentment at its alleged cross-subsidising and
hence ‘propping up’ of the literary division, causing leading ICM literary agent
Lynn Nesbit to leave and enter into partnership with Morton Janklow as
Janklow & Nesbit Associates (Gabriel, 1989: 62). Antony Harwood also
recalls the issue of film agents subsidising book agents causing ‘terrible
tension’ at Curtis Brown (UK) in the early 1990s (2008).
42 http://www.apwatt.co.uk/

3 Making Words Go Further: Book Fairs, Screen Festivals and

Writers’ Weeks as Engine Rooms of Adaptation
1 The event was made possible by the two host writers’ festivals being run
simultaneously (albeit on different sides of the world) and was promoted as
celebrating the naming of Edinburgh and more recently Melbourne as
UNESCO Cities of Literature (http://www.mwf.com.au/2008/content/mwf_
2008_events.asp?name=2427).
206 Notes
2 For example, the London Book Fair self-describes as ‘the global marketplace
for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print,
audio, TV, film and digital channels’ (http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/
files/irc_4pp_brochure_lo__final.pdf).
3 Cinema and Literature International Forum 2007 programme (3).
4 http://www.forum-cinema-litterature.com/accueil/accueil.php
5 The relationship between the study of remakes in film studies and the
discipline of adaptation studies is curious. While remakes form a currently
flourishing subfield of film studies, there has tended to be less intellectual
traffic between the two disciplines than might have been expected from their
common concern with intertextuality (Forrest and Koos, 2002; Verevis,
2006). This could be attributable to adaptation studies’ decades-long invest-
ment in the idea of adaptation as defined by a transfer of content across
mediums (cf. Hutcheon, 2006: 170). Equally, it might trace its origins to
cinema studies’ chafing against adaptation as a methodological paradigm too
grounded in literary studies assumptions to be of much benefit to the emergent
discipline (see the Introduction).
6 Given the Francophone dominance at the CLIF, it is mostly publishers rather
than agents who pitch screen adaptation rights. This is a reflection of the
comparative weakness of the literary agent in the French book world so that
screen rights are less often retained by the author but transfer to the publisher
under the publishing contract (see Chapter 2) (Vaucher, 2001; Nesselson,
2005).
7 http://www.bs2bo.com/1/en/testayantsdroit/test3.php
8 http://www.buchmesse.de/imperia/celum/documents/Books2009_booklet_
final. pdf. This rival event is discussed in detail below.
9 Industry attendance figures at the CLIF typically hover around 150–300,
whereas industry attendance at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair was 152,530
(Besserglik, 2005; Masters, 2006; http://www.buchmesse.de/en/fbf/general/
facts_figures/). That is not to say, however, that a smaller-scale event is
necessarily less productive; Barcelona-based literary and film agent Anna
Soler-Pont states of the CLIF ‘The Frankfurt Book Fair is comprehensive, but
you see people for only fifteen minutes. Here you meet them several times –
that’s what makes Monaco unique’ (Rickett, 2006: 18).
10 Long-time Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) Director Peter Weidhaas’s description
of the annual Fair (2007: 258). Subsequent FBF Director Volker Neumann
makes the same point, albeit with a more specifically cross-media emphasis,
in describing the Fair to Variety as ‘a treasure trove of film material’ (Meza,
2004: 18). The similarities with the CLIF’s self-description in its 2007
programme are striking.
11 Guests of Honour have also been selected at the sub-national level, such as the
Book Fair’s 2007 choice of ‘Catalan culture’ (not, interestingly, ‘literature’),
which predictably sparked controversy about the membership and parameters
of such a category (King, 2006; 2010).
12 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/general/
13 http://www.londonbookfair.co.uk/
14 http://einfo.book-fair.com/einfo_aum/jsp/lageplan_aum_en.jsp?event=00019
15 http://www.book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/index.html
16 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/
17 http://storydrivefrankfurt.com/conference/
18 http://www.book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/index.html
19 Hilts, 1999: 15.
20 At the time of writing, the online Frankfurt Rights Catalogue listed over
22,000 title entries (see https://en.book-fair.com/networking/search_find/
titles/search.aspx).
 Notes 207
21 For observations in a similar vein, see also: Biggs, Cunnane and Gallagher,
2004; Owen, 2006; Weidhaas, 2009; Beilby, 2009 and Moeran, 2010; cf.
Meyer, 2009.
22 http://www.rightscenter.com/
23 http://www.buchmesse.de/en/fbf/general/facts_figures/
24 http://www.frankfurt-book-fair.com/en/fbf/programme/key_focuses/film_tv/
25 http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/berlinale_co-production_market/
Berlinale_Co-Production_Market.html
26 (http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival/berlinale_co-production_market/
Berlinale_Co-Production_Market.html).
27 Email communication with Mark Woods (25 Sep. 2009).
28 The self-description of the Edinburgh International Book Festival: http://
www.edbookfest.co.uk/.
29 The vital importance of this key audience segment for the adaptation economy
is explored further in Chapter 6.
30 For example, the programme of the 2009 Hay Festival featured Canadian
author Anne Michaels introducing a screening of the film adaptation (2007)
of her novel Fugitive Pieces (1996), as well as UK celebrity screenwriter
Andrew Davies discussing his BBC television adaptation of Dickens’ Little
Dorrit (2008) (http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/downloads/DraftProg
09.pdf). As part of the programme of the 2009 Melbourne Writers’ Festival,
German novelist Bernhard Schlink addressed a screening of the film adap-
tation (2008) of his novel The Reader (1995) and took questions from the
audience afterwards (http://www.mwf.com.au/2009/content/mwf_2009_
events.asp?name=2237). At the 2009 Edinburgh International Book Festival
graphic novelist Mark Millar spoke about the process of having his comics
adapted by Hollywood (http://media.edbookfest.co.uk/bookfestival/index.
php?q=node/224).
31 Lurie is prominent within the Australia book world, having formerly been a
literary agent and sometime publisher, reviewer, freelance journalist and
teacher (http://www.mwf.com.au/2007/content/standard.asp?name=LurieC).
32 http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2&currencysetting=
GBP&localesetting=en-GB&resetfilters=true
33 Hay Festival 2009 programme downloadable from: http://www.hayfestival.
com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2&currencysetting=GBP&localesetting=en-
GB&resetfilters=true.
34 http://www.hayfestival.com/wales/index.aspx?skinid=2&currencysetting=
GBP&localesetting=en-GB&resetfilters=true
35 The intriguing – and quintessentially British – Marches TV coverage of the
‘execution’ of King Richard can be viewed on YouTube: http://www.you
tube.com/watch?v=9yks3_LcubM. I am grateful to Paul McShane, Convenor
of BookTown Australia, for drawing my attention to the recent ‘troubles’ in
Hay in his engaging December 2009 presentation for the Centre for the Book
seminar series at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

4 The Novel Beyond the Book: Literary Prize-Winners on Screen

1 The Booker Prize Archive notes that as early as 1981 Dr Dorothy Goldman
of the Adult Education Department at Keele University in the UK was offering
an evening course entitled ‘Booker Books’ (Management Committee minutes
dated 16 February 1981). Similarly, Georgetown University’s Department
of English Literature, which has a long association with the Booker Prize,
has taught such a course since 1995 (http://www.themanbookerprize.com/
perspective/articles/1281; Booker archive, 1998 file). Booker executive
208 Notes
Michael Caine also noted with pleasure in his speech to the 1986 Booker
dinner ‘the growing number of courses at universities and polytechnics
studying the Booker Prize selections over the years’ (Booker archive, 1986
file).
2 The Booker’s Prize’s fortieth anniversary celebrations included an exhibition
at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (Fiction, 2008), a dedicated panel
at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival (Herbert, 2008), an exhibition
at the library of Oxford Brookes University (UK) where the Booker archive is
housed, and a publicly voted ‘Best of the Booker’ competition (won, like the
1993 ‘Booker of Bookers’, by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children).
3 This is in contrast to the Man Booker International Prize, first awarded in
2005, which is open to living writers of all countries whose work is available
in English. It is awarded biannually not for a single title (as is the original
Booker) but for an author’s body of work (http://www.themanbookerprize.
com/prize/about-man-booker-international).
4 In its early years the Booker Prize convened award lunches at prestige London
venues such as the Stationers’ Hall, the Café Royal, and Claridge’s, but by the
mid 1980s the Guildhall had become the default venue for the Booker’s now
black-tie dinner ceremony. A brief excursion to the newly renovated Great
Court of the British Museum in 2002 has proven to be more the exception
than the rule.
5 Huggan’s 1997 article was subsequently reworked and published under the
same title as Chapter 4 of his monograph The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing
the Margins (2001).
6 Publicist Rachel Alexander’s remarks on multiple countries trying to claim
DBC Pierre (aka Peter Finlay) as their own upon his 2003 Booker Prize win
for Vernon God Little (Clee, 2003: 5).
7 The number of titles shortlisted for the Booker has fluctuated, with as few as
two titles making the shortlist in 1975. Since 1996 shortlists have uniformly
comprised six titles. The prize was split in both 1974 (between Nadine
Gordimer and Stanley Middleton) and 1992 (between Michael Ondaatje and
Barry Unsworth), before the Booker Prize Management Committee changed
the rules in 1993 to state that ‘the Prize may not be divided nor withheld’
(Booker archive, 1993 file). The reasoning behind this push for a single award
is recorded in the Booker Prize archive as early as 1970, in response to a
request by distinguished judge Rebecca West that the prize be divisible: ‘I am
told that the reasoning behind the “one big prize” theory is to give the prize
maximum importance and excitement and to give maximum publicity to
novel writing – and reading – as a whole. To split the prize would, it is argued,
diffuse the impact of the biggest, [sic] sincle [sic] prize for a single book in
a single category of writing’ (correspondence by David Powell of Booker plc,
24 April 1970).
8 The release of the Booker’s annual longlist has been a subject of some
controversy, including amongst Booker judges. Senior UK literary academic
Hermione Lee used her 2006 judging Chair’s speech to complain: ‘I have
mixed feelings about the existence of the longlist. Although it allows attention
and sales of titles which aren’t going to make it onto the short list [sic], it also
adds a double dose of humiliation for the excluded writers, it truncates the
judges’ initial reading-time by a month, and it emphasizes the commercial
aspect of the whole process. I myself wish the prize could revert to just having
a short-list, but perhaps a slightly bigger one’ (Booker archive, 2006 file).
9 The award of the Booker Prize was first broadcast live in primetime on BBC2
on 20 October 1981, the year of Salman Rushdie’s win for Midnight’s
Children, making it a watershed year for the Booker Prize in several regards.
 Notes 209
10 Book rights authority Lynette Owen is in harmony with statistics derived
from other sources on this point: ‘The proportion of films based on literary
works should be seen in the context that between 5% and 10% of options are
exercised and of those perhaps one in ten finally proceeds to production;
television options have a higher success rate than film options’ (2006: 252).
11 My research collated 49 released films and broadcast made-for-television
films/miniseries derived from the total of 236 shortlisted titles. An additional
five projects are listed on the industry standard Internet Movie Database as
in development at the time of writing (http://www.imdb.com/). This is in
contrast to film scholar Andrew Higson’s figures of eight Booker winners and
six Booker-shortlisted titles having been adapted for the screen between 1980
and 2004 (2006: 62).
12 Colman Getty was hired in 1993 to refresh the Booker Prize’s image and to
broaden its media coverage from news and literary areas into features (Booker
archive, 1993 file).
13 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1079. This list was circulated
and presumably compiled in early 2008, before the announcement of the 2008
and 2009 shortlists, accounting for the difference between Colman Getty’s
calculations and my own.
14 As of the time of writing, the Internet Movie Database lists Life of Pi as ‘in
development’, with the film scheduled for 2012 release. See http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0454876/.
15 Judging Chair David Lodge’s remarks to the 1989 Booker dinner on the
changes wrought by and on the Booker Prize during the 1980s: ‘The climate
of the nineteen-eighties has created a new phenomenon, the literary bestseller,
often written by a comparatively young or previously unknown writer, and
the Booker Prize has contributed to that climate. . . . [W]e do seem to have
reached a very critical point in the social history of the novel, and the Booker
Prize is now situated on the dangerous, glamorous interface between the two
sets of values [commercial and cultural]. . . . The growing commercial
importance of the Prize has tended to generate a certain amount of hysteria
around the event, and certainly produces considerable psychological strain for
writers, publishers, agents and, not least, judges’ (Booker archive, 1989 file).
16 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1022. The films screened
were Possession (2002), The Van (1996), A Month in the Country (1987) and
Atonement (2007).
17 http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/booker40
18 http://www.brookes.ac.uk/library/speccoll/booker.html
19 ‘I have seemed to speak deprecatingly of the other media but it is surely Mrs
Jhabvala’s command of the cinema that makes Heat and Dust with its perfect,
simple and direct cutting into two parallel narratives so unusual a thing
(certainly so unusual this year) a masterpiece that in size and, to first taste,
[sic] is slender’ (transcript of 1975 Chair’s speech in Booker Prize archive,
1975 file).
20 Respectively, Booker Prize press release dated 4 October 1979; press notes
dated 1986; and press notes dated 1989.
21 Booker archive, 1983 file.
22 Undated, unsigned memo in Booker Prize Archive file for 1983. The
Management Committee also circulated approvingly amongst its members
copies of Christopher Priest’s article ‘Books and the Box’ from the UK book
trade publication The Bookseller with the following sections underlined:
‘There appear to be two main difficulties in producing programmes about
books. The first is that books are inherently non-visual, and the second is
that almost none of the presumed audience will have read the books. . . .
210 Notes
[T]his revealed another inherent problem of television: any film “version”
of a book is a form of editorialising, and can only convey a particular view’
(5 November 1983).
23 Paul Scott’s Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977, shortly before his
death in early 1978. The Jewel in the Crown was first published in 1966, and
Scott’s repackaged quartet of novels went on to achieve huge sales in the wake
of the miniseries’ popularity and critical acclaim.
24 Booker archive, 1990 file.
25 For example, in September–October 1991 Book at Bedtime broadcast
extracts from the year’s shortlisted titles, and the following year temporarily
renamed itself Booker at Bedtime for the same purpose (Booker archive, 1991
and 1992 files).
26 On the Sunday before the 1994 Booker Prize announcement London’s
Almeida Theatre, as part of its ‘Stage Lit’ series, held readings by three of the
year’s shortlisted authors, with actors reading from the three other shortlisted
titles, all chaired by former Booker judge Fay Weldon (Booker archive 1994
file). A similar event was hosted by the Almeida in 1995 (Booker archive
1995 file).
27 See the speech by Booker Company Chair Jonathan Taylor to the 1996
Booker Prize dinner (Booker Archive, 1996 file). See also Todd, 1996;
Huggan, 1997.
28 Book Executive Committee paper dated 27 August 1974.
29 Such sentiments were still being reiterated by the Chair of the 1995 judging
committee, Tory party Member of Parliament George Walden, who used his
award-dinner speech to lament Britain’s alleged cultural decline, grumbling
that ‘already the newspapers, Parliament, television and the radio are pretty
well thought-free zones’ (Booker archive, 1995 file).
30 Booker Management Committee minutes dated 31 July 1975.
31 Zalewski, 2002a: 10.
32 The phrase belongs to Australian-born film director Phillip Noyce, who is
working on a feature film adaptation of Tim Winton’s 2002 Booker-
shortlisted novel Dirt Music, scheduled at the time of writing for 2010 release
(quoted in Wyndham, 2005b: 5).
33 McEwan states in the Atonement DVD extra ‘Novel to the Screen’ that he saw
and gave notes on every script draft, ‘on the full understanding that they can
be accepted or rejected’ (2007). McEwan also served as an Associate Producer
on the film adaptation of his novel Enduring Love (1997; 2004) (http://www.
imdb.com/name/nm0568605/).
34 WGA screenwriting credits for Possession list David Henry Hwang, Laura
Jones (for more on whom see Chapter 5) and Neil LaBute (http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0256276/fullcredits#writers).
35 The device appears to be a favourite one in the adaptation canon, and not only
for fictional adaptations. All the President’s Men (1976), based on Carl
Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1974 account of their breaking of the
Watergate cover-up story, repeatedly uses close-ups of the journalists’ type-
writers, and in fact the film’s trailer is structured around this conceit (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fLdCZm7qgs). I am grateful to Deborah
Cartmell for pointing this out in response to an earlier version of this research.
36 Adaptation scholar Christine Geraghty has also noted Atonement’s
‘foregrounding of media signifiers’, including this ‘huge close-up show[ing] the
black letters as they are typed onto the soft texture of the paper, ending with
a forceful full stop’ (2009: 95; 98).
37 Keneally records in his memoir Green’s concerns that the title Schindler’s Ark
would offend American Jewry with its connotation of Jews’ passivity in the
 Notes 211
face of the Holocaust (2007: 160). Keneally reluctantly conceded the point: ‘I
certainly had no sense that this would be my best-known book, and that the
two-title issue would haunt me and generate questions for the next twenty
years and more’ (2007: 161).
38 I note that my own university’s library shelves Schindler’s Ark in its non-
fiction section reserved for historical studies of the Holocaust (Dewey Decimal
Classification category 940: ‘General history of Europe’).
39 Booker archive, 1982 file.
40 It did, however, at least get made. This is in contrast to the long-anticipated
film adaptation of D.M. Thomas’s 1981 Booker-shortlisted title The White
Hotel – a novel also concerned with legacies of the Holocaust – which became
mired in what is known in Hollywood as ‘development hell’. In 2008 Thomas,
perhaps hoping to salvage at least some writerly mileage from his scarifying
experience, published Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of The White Hotel,
a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of Hollywood’s 25-year attempt to
film the novel. It is, in the words of one early reviewer, ‘a tell-all, behind-the-
scenes glimpse at the sometimes nefarious manner in which movies are funded
and made (or in this case, not made) in Hollywood’ (Totaro, 2009: 21).
Should Keneally’s and Thomas’s recent memoirs signal a burgeoning genre of
novelists reflecting in detail on the process of screen adaptation of their work,
this will prove a boon to future industry-oriented adaptation scholars.
41 The anecdote is strikingly reminiscent of on-set accounts of New Zealand
director Peter Jackson meditatively reading the equivalent scene in another
much valorised book – Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954) – before
shooting a particular scene in his adapted film trilogy (2001–03). These
accounts of directorial fidelity to famed source texts appear to proliferate in
circumstances where there is particular anxiety about the effect of big-budget
film-making on a fiercely-guarded or controversial text. In relation to
contemporary productions, the likelihood that such anecdotes are circulated
online by studios themselves to placate restive fans in anticipation of a film’s
release cannot be discounted (Murray, 2004b).
42 The ascendancy of book prize culture has also registered in international
rights agreements between publishers: Anne Beilby of Melbourne-based
house Text notes that Commonwealth publishers selling literary fiction titles
into the UK market sometimes now stipulate in their contracts that the UK
purchaser must submit the title for consideration for the Man Booker Prize,
the Orange Prize and/or other leading awards. This bargaining tactic has
emerged because Booker administrators have capped the number of titles that
can now be submitted by a publishing house (an attempt to make judges’
reading load more manageable) and because for a title to be eligible for the
award it must have been published in the UK and thus cannot be submitted
by Commonwealth publishers directly. Such contracts sometimes also
include a clause guaranteeing a bonus payment in the event that the title is
shortlisted for a prominent award (Australian Publishers Association, 2009).

5 Best Adapted Screenwriter?: The Intermedial Figure of the

Screenwriter in the Contemporary Adaptation Industry
1 Ian McEwan, reflecting on the process of adapting Timothy Mo’s novel Sour
Sweet (1982) for the screen, describes a feeling of screenwriterly super-
fluousness once shooting begins that is remarkably similar to Adaptation’s
opening scenes: ‘As the actors arrived and read their parts through, I made
some final adjustments and prepared to go abroad. The production offices
were filling with strangers, people from wardrobe, design, casting, location.
212 Notes
Everyone had a set of instructions. Work on the film was only just beginning,
and it was time for me to fade out’ (1988: xi). In similar retiring vein, John
Hodge, screenwriter of UK independent hits Shallow Grave (1994) and
Trainspotting (1996), compares the writer’s role to that of a ‘constitutional
monarch, consulted on everything on the understanding that the answer
would be “yes”. This is the writer’s lot: anyone who doesn’t like it should
learn either to lie or to work with actors. I began to plan my retirement’
(1996: viii). Steven Maras observes that it was only as recently as 2001 that
the Writers’ Guild of America secured for screenwriters the right ‘to visit the
set of the motion picture they have written’ (2009: 197).
2 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/awards. Admiration for the film
extends also into the burgeoning academic field of screenwriting studies:
Steven Maras’s Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (2009)
incorporates a still of Nicolas Cage in character as Charlie Kaufman into its
front-cover design.
3 Aside from the technical advantage that adapting a short story requires less
material to be cut to create the script than does a full-length novel, short
stories are typically also cheaper to option than novels because they represent
a smaller proportion of a writer’s creative output (Harrison, 2006: 69).
4 Ossana’s essay ‘Climbing Brokeback Mountain’ reveals the working
relationship between herself, McMurtry and Proulx to have been an unusually
close one for an adapted screenplay (Proulx, McMurtry and Ossana, 2006).
Ossana recalls receiving Proulx’s approval of their first script draft, noting
‘I felt fortunate to have her input’ and that Ossana ‘carried a copy of Annie’s
short story with me every day on set while producing the film’ (146; 149).
Ossana is credited on Brokeback Mountain as a producer and McMurtry (the
better known of the screenwriting partnership) as an executive producer,
preserving for the screenwriters an unusually prominent role in the film’s
production (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388795/fullcredits#cast). This is
no doubt a legacy of the project’s independent origins and its arthouse-
oriented production house, Focus Features.
5 Ian McEwan on writing the screen adaptation of Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet
(1982) (1988: vi).
6 http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/oscarlegacy/2000-2009/
index.html
7 The writing phase stands, of course, in marked contrast to the collaborative
processes involved in editing, publishing and publicising a book.
8 These terms are taken, respectively, from: Tarantino and Helgeland, 2003: 83;
Lindrea, 2004; Ramin, 2004: 16; Lemire, 2008; Dudar, 1992: 20; Seger,
1992: 9; Howard, 2006; Dudar, 1992: 20.
9 The term ‘overwhelmed’ is used by screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs in
relation to Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993), for which he wrote the
adapted screenplay (2001) (Abeel, 2001). By contrast, ‘ruthless’ is employed
in: Dudar, 1992; Abeel, 2001; Wyndham, 2005a; Howard, 2006.
10 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119488/awards
11 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268126/awards
12 For a typical example of such views see Wolf Rilla’s backhanded compliment:
‘Though adaptation of any kind must always rank creatively below originally
conceived material, its interpretive function is of a very high artistic order’
(1973: 152–53).
13 Dennis Potter was for many years a rare exception to the rule that television
was too culturally ‘debased’ a medium to support a pantheon of auteurs.
However, the growth of ‘quality television’ from around the turn of the
millennium, driven particularly by the commissioning policies and critical
 Notes 213
successes of niche cable channels such as HBO, has prompted an efflorescence
of creator–writer auteurs such as Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), David
Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire) and Matthew Weiner (Mad
Men) (McCabe and Akass, 2007).
14 http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0367838/awards
15 As a guest of the 2008 Melbourne Writers’ Festival (in itself an interesting
barometer of screenwriters’ increasing literary respectability) Andrew Davies
confessed himself ‘a big fan of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation’ (‘Faithfully’,
2008).
16 It is debatable whether, even in the 1970s, Corliss was being unduly pessi-
mistic about the availability of published screenplays. Writing in 1979, Syd
Field stated, ‘many screenplays have been reprinted in book form and most
bookstores have them, or can order them’ (12). Similarly, writing in 1980,
William Miller confirmed, ‘I have a fair number of screenplays on my
bookshelves: published copies by Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, a copy of
Citizen Kane’ (9).
17 http://www.simplyscripts.com/
18 http://www.script-o-rama.com/
19 http://www.scriptshack.com/shop/enter.html?lmd=39541.507616
20 Thomas Austin highlights the circularity of the relationship between the
source text, the screen adaptation and the tie-in edition: ‘the film is pre-sold
by the novel, which in turn is re-sold on the back of the film’ (2002: 126).
21 Similarly, writer–director Anthony Minghella’s Introduction to the published
screenplay of The English Patient (Minghella and Ondaatje, 1997) notes:
‘One significant aspect of this published text is the extent to which it differs
from the script I began shooting with. The evolution of the material has
continued in post-production as scenes have been compressed or eliminated
and, in particular, the structure of the film . . . has been radically revised’ (xv).
22 Stuart Laing makes the similar point that the published film script, ‘unlike a
published play-script, is not so much an instruction manual to be turned into
a performance, as an attempt to provide a written equivalent of one definitive
performance’ (1999: 138). Film economists Acheson and Maule confirm, in
pithier fashion, that ‘the only definitive script is the one written after the
negative has been produced’ (2005: 315).

6 Cultivating the Reader: Producer and Distributor Strategies for

Converting Readers into Audiences
1 UK literary agent Julian Friedmann, in a London Book Fair seminar about
adaptation, remarked: ‘If the writer is already a brand name . . . it’s much
easier for [the producer] to raise money. So financiers feel comfort’
(Friedmann, 2009).
2 Paramount previously owned and distributed DreamWorks SKG in an
agreement which ended in 2008.
3 Author Salman Rushdie was guest director of the Telluride Film Festival
in 2001 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2001/sep/08/telluridefilmfestival.
salmanrushdie).
4 Fine Line was subsequently bought by New Line and became the studio’s
specialist division.
5 Producer–distributor Artisan Entertainment was bought by Canadian outfit
Lions Gate Entertainment in 2003 and operations were merged.
6 Australian television sketch comedy programme The Chaser’s War on
Everything in 2009 produced a parody of the quintessential Academy-
aspirant film none too subtly titled Oscar Bait. A Holocaust-set story of a
214 Notes
‘gay, wheelchair-bound Jew’, the spoof short announces the film to be ‘based
on true market research about what the Academy likes’ and ostensibly over-
seen by ‘Academy Award seeking producer’ Harvey Weinstein, no less (http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj78anyCkM). This rather questionable-taste
sketch, seemingly a melange of Oscar favourites My Left Foot (1989),
Schindler’s List (1993), The Hours (2002) and The Reader (2008) (themselves
all literary adaptations), screened on Australia’s public-service broadcaster
ABC1 in mid 2009. Interestingly, it was not this sketch but another aired
during the same programme, in which terminally ill children were encouraged
to ‘Make a Realistic Wish’, that caused public outrage, prompting the ABC’s
Managing Director to appease taxpayers by pulling The Chaser off air for a
fortnight, questioning the critical judgement of the ABC’s head of television
programming, and forcing Chaser team member and executive producer
Julian Morrow to issue several public mea culpas.
7 http://www.theparistheatre.com/
8 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104454/awards
9 Harvey Weinstein quoted in ‘Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans.’ (1997)
Time 21, Apr.: 40.
10 Grover, 2009.
11 The Weinsteins founded the company Shining Excalibur Films solely to
handle release of Kids because corporate parent Disney was fearful of negative
publicity tarnishing the head company’s ‘family-friendly’ brand identity
(http://www.imdb.com/company/co0144562/) (Biskind, 2004: 211–15; King,
2009: 109).
12 Only moderately impressed by the film, People Weekly US critic Leah Rozen
expressed doubts about the scalability of this promotional tactic, noting
wryly, ‘Sorry to say, but Miramax has no plans to hand out the screenplay
when Trainspotting unspools at your local film palace’ (1996: 17).
13 http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=reader.htm
14 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087075/usercomments. At the time of writing
The Company of Wolves had a cumulative rating of 6.6 out of 10, based on
5,445 votes.
15 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117951/
16 ‘From Book to Film’, http://thereader-movie.com/site/
17 ‘From Book to Film’, http://thereader-movie.com/site/
18 Gallagher has more recently returned to public prominence with her decision
to publish the original versions of multiple Carver short stories radically
edited for their initial publication by Carver’s former editor Gordon Lish
(‘Rough’, 2007). Random House/Knopf, publisher of Carver’s celebrated
collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) had
threatened to block publication of the unedited stories on the grounds of
copyright infringement, but the volume, entitled Beginners, subsequently
appeared in the UK under the Chatto, Bodley Head and Cape imprint in
October 2009. The whole incident has sparked interesting speculation over
the nature of editorial intervention in the production of literature and whether
texts are the creation of Romanticised individual consciousness or of a more
socially based process of collaborative production – much like the revisionist
view of adaptation as an industrial phenomenon advocated in the present
volume (Campbell, 2007; Ley, 2010).
19 Schuker, 2010. Box Office Mojo statistics record that The Reader achieved
68.6 per cent of its total lifetime grosses (US$74 million) from foreign markets
(http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=reader.htm).
20 Roiling conflict over The Reader’s final cut and release date had become the
dominant media story about the film from September 2008, threatening to
 Notes 215
eclipse Faber’s carefully designed campaign of literary cultivation. Briefly, the
dispute arose over whether Daldry, finetuning the Broadway musical
adaptation of his earlier film Billy Elliot (2000) by day while editing The
Reader by night, would have a final cut of the film ready in time for 2008
Golden Globe contention. Harvey Weinstein, with TWC’s financial situation
foremost in mind, was agitating strongly for a November 2008 release.
Another of The Reader’s executive producers, Hollywood mogul Scott Rudin,
already had both Revolutionary Road and Doubt in contention for the 2008
Oscar season, and supported Daldry’s request for more post-production time
and thus a 2009 release date. Rudin’s threat (subsequently acted upon) to take
his name off The Reader’s credits opened up a further front in the dispute.
Moreover, the question of whether Kate Winslet would secure Oscar
nominations for both Revolutionary Road (directed by her then husband Sam
Mendes) and The Reader, and would thus be competing against herself, added
an extra celebrity frisson to the more industry-centric release-date conflict.
Eventually, a US release date of 12 December 2008 was arrived at as a
compromise, making the film eligible for the all-important 2008 Academy
Award competition (Zeitchik, 2008; ‘Happy’, 2008; Goodwin, 2008; Adams,
2008; ‘Itching’, 2008; Grover, 2009).
21 http://www.accompaniedliterarysociety.org/
22 http://www.accompaniedliterarysociety.org/

Afterword: Restive Audiences and Adaptation Futures

1 http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks
&field-keywords=Pride+and+Prejudice+and+Zombies; http://www.imdb.com/
title/tt1374989/
2 http://www.remixmylit.com/
3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5W9lvuLM8
4 http://www.bornofhope.com/
5 http://www.literatureonscreen.com/?q=node/28;http://www.gbz.hu-berlin.
de/Eventsstorage/international-conference-201crewriting-remixing-and-
reloading
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Index

Academy Awards 5–6, 42–3, 119, Atonement [film] 110, 118–19,

129–30, 142, 144, 151, 163, 165, 123–4, 154–5
168–74, 180–1, 183, 213n6, ‘attachment’ to screen projects 133,
214n20 138–42
Accompanied Literary Society (ALS) Atwood, M 114
180–2 audiences 9–10, 15, 18, 23, 43, 120,
actors 151 128, 133, 146, 150, 157–84,
Adaptation [film] 41, 46, 121, 131–2, 185–91; at writers’ festivals
135, 140, 195n26, 213n15 98–101; creation of unauthorised
Adaptation [journal] 2–3, 194n18 adaptations by 189–91; fan
adaptation studies 1–4, 7, 35, 41, 45, attitudes and behaviours among
49, 95, 100, 120, 132–4, 137, 143, 22–3, 45, 120, 143, 156, 189–91,
146, 156–84, 186, 190–1, 192n1, 211n41; medium-neutrality of 104;
197n10, 206n5; biological of arthouse cinema 120
metaphors in 73, 195n26; ‘myths’ Austen, J 147, 189
of 12–16; sociological approaches Austin, T 213n20
to 4, 6, 16–17, 20, 22–3, 79, 92–3, Australia Council for the Arts 189
101–2, 103, 146, 158, 164, auteur theory 22, 27, 49, 132–3,
174–82, 184–7, 194n18; successive 135–7, 142, 149–50, 152, 155,
waves of 7–10, 15, 77, 101–2, 160, 164, 172, 178, 183, 212n13
145, 157, 186, 189 authors 12–14, 16, 20, 21, 25–6, 80,
Adiga, A 92 98, 120–1, 131, 137–9, 142, 146,
agents see literary agents; see also 152, 155, 158–60, 171, 174–8,
talent agents 180, 188, 194n20; adapting own
Allen, W 152 work 143; advances 38; and
Altman, R 164, 168, 177–8 literary agents 38–41;
Ames, J 180 anti-adaptation 47–8; as executive
Amis, M 52, 57–62, 70 producers 27, 49, 119, 139–40,
Andrew, D 192n4 159–60; as screenwriters 41–3, 49;
Annales school 31 at film premieres 26–7, 35, 46,
A.P. Watt 51, 73 119, 176; cameo appearances by
Armstrong, G 141, 149 44–5, 49, 120–1, 176, 187;
arthouse films 158–85, 188 celebrity authorship 28, 33–6,
Artisan Entertainment 165, 213n5 44–9, 71, 75, 77, 97, 101, 106,
Association for Adaptation Studies 139, 175, 187; ‘death’ of 28–9, 32,
(AAS) 2, 191, 195n29 34, 36, 60; marketability of 13;
Association of Literature on Screen professionalisation of 28, 31–3,
Studies (ALSS) 2, 137 49, 51, 54, 139, 196n9; Romantic
Athill, D 71 conception of 25–8, 34, 45, 49, 54,
246 Index
132, 135, 145–6, 187, 196n5; graphic novels at 85; competition
theories of 28–36; ‘twin-track’ from online rights-trading 89–91;
authorship 42–3, 72, 93, 114, 130, Frankfurt Book Fair 56–7, 67, 78,
143 81–91, 93, 96, 104–5, 163,
201n13, 206n9, 206n10;
Baddiel, D 118 Guadalajara 82; literary agents at
Baetens, J 152–3, 195n21, 199n27, 85–6; London Book Fair 78, 82,
199n30 89, 93, 204n32, 206n2, 213n1;
Bakhtin, M 10 post-colonial dynamics of 83, 92;
Banks, R 44 rights-trading at 82–9
Barnes, J 58, 200n37 book history 13, 17, 19–20, 28–9,
Barthes, R 9, 29–31, 36 31–3, 49, 50, 121
BBC 44, 100, 114–15, 147 book prizes 13, 16, 18–19, 20, 34,
Beilby, A 211n42 64–5, 103–30, 158, 160, 177,
Beja, M 15 187–8; celebritising effect of 106;
Berlinale Day [Frankfurt] 86, 91, 96 Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes
Bernard, T 169 104; Costa Book Awards 104;
Berne Convention 31 effect on adaptation of 104;
Bertelsmann 61 Governor General’s Literary
Bielby, D 141 Award 105; Guardian First Book
Bielby W 141 Award 104; IMPAC Dublin
Biriotti, M 34 Literary Award 105; James Tait
Bluestone, G 1, 8, 12, 15 Black Memorial Prize 104; judging
board games 5 of 105–6; Miles Franklin Award
Bolter, JD 14 104–5; National Book Awards
Bonham-Carter, V 32 104, 111; National Book Critics
book clubs 180 Circle Award; New York Times
Booker Prize 19, 20, 22, 92, 95, 100, Notable Book 104; Nobel Prize
104–30; 140, 172, 205n36; 207n1, 104, 140; Orange Prize 63, 104,
211n42; archive 113, 207n1; 211n42; Prime Minister’s Literary
208n2; broadcasting of 114, Awards 105; Pulitzer Prize 104,
208n9; dinner announcement of 179; theoretical approaches to
108, 110, 113–14, 209n15; 103, 106–9, 128; see also Booker
fortieth anniversary of 113, 117, Prize
208n2; history of 113, 115–17; book retailing see bookselling
impact of 105, 109–13, 117, 126, book reviewing 13, 32, 105, 146,
209n15; judging of 113, 117–18, 207n31
125, 209n15, 210n29; Man Books at Berlinale 81, 91–3
Booker International Prize 208n3; Books at MIFF [Melbourne
name of 104; profile in US of International Film Festival] 93–5
111–13; readings from titles Bookseller 73, 209n22
shortlisted for 115; rules of 105, bookselling 32, 34, 36, 40, 83, 101,
107, 109, 208n7; scandals 105, 109, 128, 130, 152, 168
associated with 126; shortlisted Booth, R 100–1
titles adapted for screen 105–30, Boozer, J 137–8
139, 147, 149–50; thirtieth Bourdieu, P 6, 16, 18–19, 28, 73, 77,
anniversary of 113 79, 83, 91, 107–8, 117, 130, 139,
book fairs 13, 20–1, 33, 39, 77–9, 142, 147, 172, 174, 185, 192n5
82–9, 97, 101–2, 181, 187, Boyle, D 172, 176
194n20, 198n23; awards at 86; Breuvart, C 80–1
Bologna Children’s Book Fair 78, British Film Institute (BFI) 183
82, 89; BookExpo America 78, 82; Brokeback Mountain 134, 140, 152
collaboration with film festivals Brooks, G 44
78, 85–9, 91–7; comics and Brouillette, S 34–5, 55, 77, 196n8
 Index 247
Brown, C see Curtis Brown Crying Game, The 158, 170
Brown, D 27 cultural capital 34, 79, 109, 116, 157,
Byatt, AS 58, 119–21, 190 164, 167, 174, 187
cultural festivals see writers’ festivals;
CAA 142 see also film festivals
Cahiers du Cinéma 135 cultural imperialism 47
Cahir, LC 14 cultural nationalism 62–9
Caine, M 115–16, 207n1 cultural policy 21, 23, 32, 78, 80,
Campion, J 149, 153 204n32, 205n40; and film festivals
Cannon 175 91, 93–5; and writers’ festivals 97
Canongate Books 67, 181 cultural studies 1, 4, 6, 9–11, 16, 18,
Cardwell, S 2 28, 49, 72, 77, 116, 151
Carey, J 125 Cunningham, M 44, 179, 181
Carey, P 64 Curtis Brown 51, 64, 205n41
Carringer, R 136 Cusack, J 131
Carter, A 175
Cartmell, D 2, 15, 147, 194n18, Daldry, S 100, 171, 176, 178–9, 181,
196n2, 210n35 214n20
Carver, R 164, 177–8, 214n18 Darwin, C 195n26
Casanova, P 76 Davies, A 147–50, 207n30, 231n15
CCS Stellar 69–70 Davies, L 44
Chaplin, C 70 DeBona, G 193n13, 193n14
Chase, D 212n13 deconstruction 4
Chevalier, T 194n20 Delany, P 60, 205n36
Cinema and Literature International Desai, A 54, 119
Forum (CLIF) see Forum Desai, K 111
International Cinéma et Littérature Deutchman, I 164
(FICL) Dickens, C 147
cinematographers 133 digitisation 14, 17–18, 20, 22–3, 33,
ciné-romans 153 37, 49, 50, 71–4, 78, 84, 86, 98; of
circuit models 77–8, 81, 91, 93 rights-trading 89–91
Clinton, B 100 directors 27, 49, 80, 95, 100, 118–19,
Clooney, G 150 132–3, 135–7, 141, 146, 151–2,
Cochran, T 83 155, 158, 160, 163, 167, 174, 177,
Coetzee, JM 35, 95, 140 183, 188
Coffee, L 134 distributors 20, 22, 80, 91, 145–6,
Colman Getty 110, 209n12, 209n13 156–84, 188, 191; role of 161–4
Columbia Pictures 46, 162 Dobbin, C 93
comic books 5–6, 10, 16, 20, 37, 41, Doyle, R 119
80–1, 85, 100, 186 Drewe, R 108, 196n3
companion volumes 15, 23, 36, 72,
130, 152–3 Ebury 152
Company of Wolves, The [film] 175 editors 16, 20, 38–9, 50, 54–6, 115,
computer games 5, 10–11, 16, 20, 37, 144, 187
41, 72, 74, 80, 85, 142, 153, 160, Elliott, K 2, 193n11
186, 190, 197n15 Ellroy, J 144
Connolly, R 95 English, JF 16, 44, 48, 60, 108–9, 172
Contardi, B 37 English Patient, The [film] 110, 119,
copyright see rights 129–30, 146, 170, 173, 213n21
Corliss, R 136–7, 150–1, 231n16 Enright, A 111–12
Corrigan, T 196n2 Epstein, EJ 163
creative industries 20, 30, 33, 53, 73 Epstein, J 55, 71
creative writing programs 32, 55, 62, Eugenides, J 75
106, 151 Evans, N 41
248 Index
Faber and Faber 152, 154 Fox, M 54
Faber, G 180, 214n20 Fox Searchlight 42, 162
fans see audiences franchising 26, 35–6, 43, 71, 160,
feminism 9 199n27
fidelity criticism 7–8, 10, 22, 27, 45, Frankfurt Book Fair see book fairs
133, 147–50, 157, 175, 193n10, Frankfurt School 5, 17
211n41 Franklin, D 198n25, 199n27,
Field, S 133, 135, 231n16 203n22, 203n24
Field, T 43 Friedmann, J 45, 198n21, 199n30,
Fielding, H 200n37 213n1
Fiennes, R 179 Frow, J 44, 60
Film and Media Forum [Frankfurt] Fuller, R 116
85–9
film festivals 22, 39, 77–9, 91–7, Gallagher, T 177–8, 214n18
101–2, 161, 163, 167, 171, 181, Gardiner, J 36, 60
183, 187; academic analysis of 91; Geahan, B 180
awards at 91, 163, 166–7, 170, Gedin, E 86–7
183; Berlinale 78, 81, 86–9, 91, Gemmell, N 64
93, 95, 163, 179; Cannes 78, Genette, G 9
80–1, 96, 153, 163, 167, 170, 176; Geraghty, C 3, 5, 182–3, 193n6,
collaboration with book fairs 78, 194n19, 210n36
85–9, 91–7; Melbourne 93–5; Gilbertsson, J 86–7
Sundance 78, 163, 167; Telluride Gill, M 165, 170, 173
163, 231n3; Toronto 163, 167; Gillies, MA 51
Tribeca 163; Venice 163 Glyn, E 44
film marketing and publicity 157–84, Godwin, D 64
188; cross-over strategy 160, Golden, A 141
167–74, 182, 188; exploitation- Goldman, W 134
style 170–1; location 164, 168–9, Goldsworthy, K 97
183; seasonality 164–6, 183; Gondry, M 150
significance of reviews for 165–7, Good Machine 63
170–1, 182–3; width 164, 166–8, Gordon, G 56
183 see also distributors Grahame-Smith, S 189
film studies 1, 3, 121, 132–3, 135–6, Granada Television 114
151, 156, 185–6 see also auteur Granata, M 167–8
theory graphic novels see comic books
Filmyard Holdings 170 Green, D 125, 210n37
Fine Line Features 164, 168, 172, green-lighting 40, 42, 157, 183
213n4 Grisham, J 198n25, 199n28
Fink, M 144 Grove Atlantic 111–12
Flanagan, R 64, 200n32 Grusin, R 14–15
Fleming, I 72 Guardian 100, 116 see also book
Florence, P 100–1 prizes
Florence, N 100 Gutenberg, J 29–31, 33
Focus Features 162, 212n4
Forster, EM 149, 169 Hampton, C 154–5
Forman, D 114–5 Hanson, C 144
Forum International Cinéma et Hare, D 149, 176, 179
Littérature (FICL) 39, 79–82, 89, HarperCollins 58, 64
93, 95, 196n4, 206n9; prizes Harwood, A 196n9, 197n14, 201n13,
awarded at 80–1, 104–5 203n20, 205n41
Foucault, M xiii, 29–31, 34, 46, 49, Harwood, R 149
196n5, 196n7 Helgeland, B 144
Fox 162 Hemingway, E 25–6
 Index 249
‘heritage’ cinema 182 Jolie, A 96
Hermanns, P 76, 92 Jones, L 147–50, 210n34
Heyward, M 67 Jonze, S 41, 46, 121, 131, 135, 150,
Higham, D 140 195n26
Higson, A 194n18, 200n37, 209n11 Jordan, N 120, 175
history of the book see book history Journal of Adaptation in Film and
Hitchcock, A 133 Performance 3, 137
Hodder and Stoughton 117, 126 Journal of Screenwriting 137
Hodge, J 173, 211n1
Hollinghurst, A 147 Kaufman, C 46, 131, 140–1, 144,
Hollywood 13, 28, 45–8, 70, 113, 146, 150–1, 213n15
119, 127, 131–2, 136, 139, 141–2, Kavanagh, P 57–8, 70
159, 162–5, 176, 179, 184, Keener, C 131
197n14, 197n15, 198n24, 199n28, Keneally, T 111, 114, 119, 125–8,
207n30, 211n40; 214n20 specialist 210n37
divisions in 41, 158, 162–3, 167, Kerrigan, F 168
184 Kidman, N 179
Hollywood Reporter 166 Klebanoff, AM 58, 61
Hooper, C 52, 62–9, 201n13 Knopf 63
Howards End 169, 172 Koontz, D 199n28
Huggan, G 107–8, 205n36, 208n5 Kristeva, J 10
Hunter, IQ 188–9
Hutcheon, L 3, 5, 146, 192n4, LaBute, N 119–21, 210n34
195n26, 196n30 Laing, S 231n22
Larsson, S 86–8
identity politics 3 Lazarus, PN 159, 164
independent films 158, 160, 162–3, Lee, J 204n28
167–8, 170 Leitch, T 3, 5–6, 11, 193n6, 194n18,
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 194n20, 205n39
113 librarians 32
Intellect 137 licensing 15, 20
intellectual property (IP) see rights Lions Gate Entertainment 213n5
International Creative Management Lish, G 214n18
(ICM) 70, 142, 205n41 literary agents 16, 20, 21, 26, 30–1,
International Management Group 36–43, 50–75, 79–80, 111, 115,
(IMG) 70 138–40, 146, 159–61, 187–8,
International Toy Fair [Nuremberg] 194n20, 197n14, 207n31; and
89 globalisation 62–9, 74–5; and
intertextuality 3 writers’ estates 67, 72; at book
Irving, J 44 fairs 56–7, 85–6; codes of practice
Ishiguro, K 114 of 61; commission rates of 55;
Ivory, J 113, 121 consolidation of 69–74, 187;
contract negotiation by 53–5, 58;
Jackson, P 211n41 editing by 56; gender imbalance
Jacobs, RN 212n9 among 56; marketing and publicity
Jacobs, S 140 role of 56, 60; origins of 51;
James, H 149 relationship with authors 54–7;
Janklow & Nesbit Associates 74, relationship with publishers 53–7,
205n41 67; rise of 73–5; role of 53–7; sub-
Janklow, ML 58, 61, 74, 205n41 agents 38, 198n18; ‘superagents’
Jhabvala, RP 113–14, 119, 131, 57–8, 70, 74, 202n16; see also
147–50, 169, 209n19 talent agents
Jonathan Cape 57–8, 61, 63, literary festivals see writers’ festivals
203n22 literary prizes see book prizes
250 Index
literary studies 1, 6, 33, 50, 78, 95, Minghella, A 119–20, 128–30, 163,
97, 103, 116, 121, 128, 132, 135, 173, 213n21
196n2, 197n10, 206n5; Miramax 20, 22, 158, 162, 165,
internationalist approaches to 168–74, 176, 214n12
76–8; role in defining ‘Literature’ Mo, T 144, 211n1
of 98–101, 143 Moggach, D 44–5, 145, 199n28,
Literature/Film Quarterly 3 200n45
Litwak, M 166–7 Monticelli, A 140
Lodge, D 119, 209n15 Moran, J 34–5, 47, 60
Lurie, C 99, 207n31 Motion Picture Association of
Lyman, R 167 America (MPAA) 162, 170
multipurposing 26
magazines 31 Murdock, G 135
Malcolm, J 123 Murphy, PC xiii
Malin, A 165
Man Booker Prize see Booker Prize Naremore, J 1, 7, 192n4
Manne, L 172 narratology 9, 118
Maras, S 138, 211n1, 212n2 Neil, A 70–1
Márquez, GG 47–8 Nesbit, L 56, 74, 205n41
Martel, Y 111 Net Book Agreement (NBA) 205n40
Martyn, S 64 Neumann, V 206n10
Marxism 11, 19, 52, 117, 192n4 New Line Cinema 162, 213n4
Mase, Jacinta di 56 Newmarket Press 42–3, 152, 154
McCabe, P 119–20 Nick Hern Books 152
McCarthy, C 146 novelisations 15, 23, 37, 87, 146,
McColl, P 37 152–3
McCourt, F 181 Noyce, P 210n32
McCreadie, M 136
McCrum, R 106, 130 Ondaatje, M 35, 119–20, 129
McEwan, I 119, 123, 144, 146, 154, option process 13, 38, 86, 110–1,
211n1 118, 138–43, 194n20, 209n10
McFarlane, B 14 Orlean, S 46, 140–1
McKee, R 135, 150 Orloff, J 144
McLuhan, M 14 Orr, J 195n24
McMurtry, L 134, 140, 212n4 Ossana, D 140, 212n4
McPhee, H 83, 92 Owen, L 90, 197n11, 198n16,
McShane, P 207n35 209n10
media and communication studies 1,
15, 33, 35, 72, 151, 190 ‘packaging’ 71, 142, 159, 162
media conglomerates 13–14, 17–20, Palfreyman, J 63, 65
26–8, 33–8, 41, 43, 49, 50, 54–5, Paramount 162
61–2, 69, 71, 78, 84, 104, 152, Paramount Decree 141, 162
160, 186, 190, 197n11 Paramount Vantage 162
merchandising 11, 36–7, 48, 74, 86 Payne, A 42–3
Merchant Ivory 149, 169 Pearl, M 96, 144, 198n24
Meredith, S 58, 61 Penguin 63, 130
Messitte, A 200n48 Penhall, J 131, 146
Metz, C 9 Perkins, M 54, 144
MGM 126 Perlman, E 64
Michaels, A 207n30 Perren, A 170
Michel, C 70–2 Perrotta, T 43–4
Millar, M 207n30 Peters, Fraser & Dunlop (PFD) 52–3,
Miller, W 137, 213n16 57, 69–74, 202n17
Millington, M 79 Pfefferberg, P 125
 Index 251
Pickett, R 42 remakes 80, 87, 206n5
Pinker, JB 51 Remix My Lit 189
Pinter, H 149 Rickett, J 53, 69
pitching 80, 86 rights 15, 20, 21, 26–33, 36, 49,
Pitt, B 96 50–1, 53, 55, 77, 79, 83, 130,
playwrights 100 186–91, 197n11; Creative
Polan, D 135 Commons 189; in film scripts 152;
political economy 6, 10–11, 17, 51, sales at film festivals 91–7; film
83, 185, 205n39 rights 25, 38, 45, 47–8, 53, 63, 71,
Porter, A 201n13 79, 87, 93–4, 111, 126, 138–9,
post-colonialism 3, 9, 77, 83, 107–8, 141, 157, 159, 178, 198n21;
116, 128 growth of subsidiary rights 36–43,
post-structuralism 3, 9–10, 27–8, 32, 74–5, 86, 138; novelisation rights
34, 49, 77 153; online rights-trading 89–91;
Potter, D 212n13 sales at book fairs of 82–9;
Premiere 150 ‘splitting’ of 65–9, 204n29
pre-publication film rights sales 40, Rilla, W 212n12
87, 92 Rosenbloom, H 66, 204n32
Price, S 138, 147, 154 Roth, P 27, 62
Priest, C 209n22 Roy, A 48
print culture 23, 49, 101, 121–23, Rudin, S 214n20
127 Rushdie, S 35, 44, 78, 107, 208n2,
prizes see book prizes 208n9, 213n3
producers 20, 22, 47, 80, 86, 92–3, Russian formalism 9
100, 110, 117, 136, 139–41,
143–6, 150, 153, 156–84, 188; as Salinger, JD 47
associate producers 159; as Sanders, J 3
executive producers 159; as line Saxon, E 46
producers 159 see also Schatz, T 14
independent films Schepisi, F 114
producers representatives 160–1, 166 Schiff, S 144
production designers 133 Schiffrin, A 71
Proulx, A 140, 212n4, 212n9 Schindler’s Ark/List [book] 125–8
publishers 14, 16, 20, 21, 29, 32, Schindler’s List [film] 110, 119,
38–43, 50, 75, 80, 82–9, 92–3, 121–8, 188, 213n6
101, 111, 115, 121, 138, 142, Schlink, B 95, 171, 176, 179–80,
145–6, 151–3, 158, 174–5, 187–8, 207n30
207n31 Scott, P 114, 210n23
Publishers Weekly 89, 91, 110, 164, scouts 39–41, 92, 161, 194n20,
171, 178 198n26
publishing 18, 34, 71; in France 67, screen festivals see film festivals
201n1, 206n6 screenplay publishing 15, 36, 42, 46,
publishing studies 23, 33 72, 129–30, 133, 151–5, 173, 176,
Pynchon, T 47 213n16
screenplays see screenwriters
Raengo, A 3 screenwriters 20, 22, 28, 46, 71, 80,
Raftos, R 197n15 100, 119, 131–55, 158–9, 174,
Random House 57–8, 61, 63, 93–4, 188; as celebrities 98, 147–51,
214n18 188; as executive producers 212n4;
reader response theory 4 attachment to projects 140–2;
Reader, The [film] 156, 171, 173–4, commissioning of 141; freelance
176–7, 178–81, 213n6, 214n19, 141; manuals for 134–5;
214n20 marginalisation of 132–7, 150–1,
Reilly, M 197n15 153–5; memoirs by 134; prizes for
252 Index
132; relationships with authors of theme-park rides 5, 11
140, 143–5, 149–50, 212n4; The Weinstein Company (TWC) 170,
sociological approaches to the role 173–4, 178–80, 181–2, 214n20
of 136; status of scripts by 151–5; see also Weinstein, B and
theorisations of 134–8; who are Weinstein, H
also dramatists 149, 154–5, 176, Thomas, DM 211n40
179; who are also novelists 79, Thompson, HS 75
113–14, 119, 143, 145, 160; Thompson, JB 83
women as 136, 141, 149; see also Thuan, J 143
option process; see also screenplay ‘tie-in’ editions 15, 24, 36, 42, 46,
publishing 72, 75, 130, 146, 152–4,
Scribe 66 213n20
scriptwriters see screenwriters Todd, R 60, 107–8, 111
Segal, E 42 Tolkien, JRR 211n41
semiotics 9 Toltz, S 64
sex, lies, and videotape 165, 170 Trainspotting 170, 172–3, 176,
Shannon, R 86 214n12
Simon, D 212n13 translation 76, 79
‘slipping’ 40 Tranter, L 197n14, 201n5, 201n7
Smith, Z 44 Trewin, I 110, 117, 126
sociology see adaptation studies Truffaut, F 133, 135
Soderbergh, S 165, 170
Sony 100–1 UNESCO 79
Sony Pictures Classics 162, 167, 169, United Agents 52–3, 69–73
172 Universal Pictures 111, 126, 162
Sorkin, A 212n13
Spielberg, S 111, 119, 121–23, 126–8, Variety 85, 166, 173, 179
166, 199n28 Victor, E 201n4
Squires, C 60, 199n27 Villarejo, A 158
Staiger, J 141 Vintage Books 200n48
Stam, R 3, 5, 10, 23, 192n4, 193n14, Virago 175
194n19, 196n30
Starke, R 97 Walt Disney Pictures 162–3, 170,
stars 35, 40, 47, 49, 62, 77–8, 96, 214n11
100, 131–2, 135–6, 139, 142, Warner Bros. Pictures 162
147–51, 154–5, 158–9, 163, 167, Warner Independent 181
169, 173–4, 179, 183, 188 Wasko, J 192n3
Stempel, T 136 Waters, S 44, 111, 147
Stewart, C 97 Watt, AP see A.P. Watt
structuralism 9 Waugh, E 72
studios 14, 158, 162, 165, 167, 191 Weidhaas, P 84, 90, 206n10
see also Hollywood Weiner, M 212n13
Sundance Film Festival 20 Weinstein, B 22, 169–74, 178–80,
Süskind, P 47–8 214n11
Swicord, R 141 Weinstein, H 22, 156, 158, 169–74,
Swinton, T 141 176, 178–80, 181–2, 213n6,
214n9, 214n11, 214n20 see also
talent agents 69, 72, 141–3, 147, 155, The Weinstein Company
159, 187 see also literary agents Weir, N 93
Tarantino, Q 163, 167 Weldon, F 114, 210n26
television 156, 160 Welsh, I 172, 176
Text 67, 211n42 West, JLW 32–3
textual analysis 4, 7–9,16, 35, 106–7, Whelehan, I 2, 15, 194n18, 196n2
134, 183 Whitlam, G 64
 Index 253
William Morris Agency 70, 72, 142 78, 98; audience orientation of
Wilson, A 113 98–102; Commonwealth basis of
Winslet, K 173–4, 179, 214n20 98; distinctions between 98–102;
Winterbottom, M 96 Edinburgh 78, 98, 207n28,
Winterson, J 53 207n30; Hay 78, 100–1, 207n30;
Winton, T 210n32 Melbourne 78, 98, 213n15; role in
Wolff, J xiii, 193n8 defining ‘Literature’ 98–102;
women’s studies 1 Sydney 78, 98; Toronto 78, 98
Woolf, V 179, 182 Wylie, A 39, 52, 201n1; and Amis
Working Title Films 79, 100, 118, 57–62, 69; and Hooper 62–9
200n37 Wylie Agency 57, 60, 63, 67–8
Wright, J 123, 155
writers’ festivals 13, 20, 22, 30, 33, York, L 35
39, 66, 77–9, 97–101, 187;
academic analysis of 97; Adelaide Zaillian, S 127