ADAPTATIONS: From Short Story to Big Screen
EXCERPT
The Good, the Bad and the Unadaptable
The paradox is this: Great stories often make poor movies and vice-versa. In his 1999 Hopwood Lecture, Lawrence Kasdan (Silverado, The Big Chill) said that he found this idea both liberating and inspiring: "My experience is that high art often starts in low places." And in fact, some of the most successful movies of all time have come from "low places." In the early days of cinema, potboilers were everywhere, and so were their film adaptations. Classic films like Stagecoach, All About Eve, and Bringing up Baby were all adapted from fiction found in mass market magazines. (In fact, "Stage to Lordsburg," the basis for Stagecoach, and Hagar Wilde's "Bringing Up Baby" were published in the same issue of Colliers). Stories like these were routinely snatched up by the studios on the off chance that they might make a good film. And if the quality of writing was mediocre, it didn't matter. What mattered was the story.
Howard Hawks was more candid about it than most directors. "Above all in a motion picture is the story," he said over and over, and it was this single-minded focus on storytelling over what he called "camera trick-work" that allowed him to move effortlessly across film genres. No director, before or since, has amassed as many classics in as many different styles: from gangster films (Scarface, 1932), to film noir (The Big Sleep, 1946), to Westerns (Red River, 1948), to horror (The Thing, 1951), to musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) to war dramas (Sergeant York, 1941)-and, of course, to the definitive screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Hawks often let his movies form organically, filming sequentially and rewriting the script every day to incorporate new interactions between story, actors and characters. The Bringing Up Baby set was an unusually happy one, with much on-set improvising and censor-baiting. (All of the "bone" double entendres managed to survive the Hays Office.) According to Fritz Feld, who played the psychiatrist in the supper club, "… Hawks would come in and say, 'It's a nice day today. Let's go to the races.' And we'd pack up and go to the races. Kate continued her custom of serving tea on the set. We all laughed and laughed, and were very happy." Not surprisingly, the picture went wildly over budget, but Hawks's easy, relaxed manner was the incubator that created a classic. "The difficult work," Hawks once said, "is the preparation: finding the story, deciding how to tell it, what to show and what not to show."
Wilde's story was recommended to Hawks by the RKO story department because the dialogue was "hilariously funny and the possibilities for further complication are limitless." The story was purchased for $1004 and Wilde was persuaded, despite her initial reluctance, to come to Hollywood to work on the screenplay. A novelist, playwright and short story writer in her early thirties, Wilde had already
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done a four-week stint in the Hollywood working for Howard Hughes, but the experience had not been pleasant. In fact, her 1933 O. Henry Prize-winning story, "The Brat," was a caustic send-up of movie-style manipulation, which one of the judges said "shed an entirely new light on Hollywood theatrics." Although Dudley Nichols was the seasoned screenwriter on Bringing Up Baby, Wilde was retained to create additional situations and ensure the comic tone and characters remained consistent with her story. Her experience on the film must have been a positive one-everyone had fun-because afterwards she continued to work in films, most notably with Hawks again on I Was A Male War Bride and with Raymond Chandler on The Unseen.
Despite her work on both coasts-she also wrote several successful Broadway plays-Wilde is a forgotten writer. There are scores of books on the comedies of the thirties with long discussions about the genius of Bringing Up Baby, but only a few of them even mention Hagar Wilde's name. She died in 1971, penniless and bitter, at the Motion Picture Country Home.* A number of years later one of her friends wrote a letter to the New York Times under the title "When Film Directors Get Credit for What Screenwriters Do": "All these years," Wilde's friend wrote, "I have marveled at the way critics gasp with awe at the genius of a film director for qualities created by the writer. … Only the imagination of Hagar Wilde could have produced that hunt through a Connecticut night in pursuit of a leopard named Baby. … At the time she died … her film was being enjoyed by millions on late night television. None of these showings added a penny … [to what she received for] the rights."
Still, Wilde almost surely never meant her story to be considered great literature: It's a typical situation comedy that emphasizes zany plot over depth of characterization or insight. So how did an average commercially-intended story become a movie hailed by The National Society of Film Critics as one of the "100 Essential Films"? First off, it was a collaborative effort with Hawks providing an environment flexible enough to take advantage of the happy accident.When Hepburn broke the heel off her shoe during filming, Grant whispered to her the ad-lib line "I was born on the side of a hill" and they kept on going. In her autobiography, Hepburn recalled, "Everyone contributed anything and everything they could to that script." And because RKO was in receivership at the time, the filmmakers were unusually free of interference. The executives may have suspected Hawks of going over budget, but they simply had bigger problems to deal with. And perhaps most importantly, there was Hawks's preference for using "personalities" instead of "actors." Both Hepburn and Grant played a variation of themselves in the film, shrugging into Wilde's two-dimensional characters as if they were off-the-rack suits, then tailoring them to fit perfectly. Which was exactly what Hawks wanted. Of Hepburn he said, " … she played perfectly-not trying to be funny, but being very, very natural and herself."
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©Stephanie Harrison
Updated 5/7/05
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