Starting with the 1969 premiere of the “ABC Movie of the Week” anthology (remember “Brian’s Song”?) and continuing through 1970s “event” TV including movies “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and “The Execution of Private Slovik” and landmark miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man” and “Roots,” bestselling books have regularly served as the basis for Emmy‑winning programming.
These days, the upsurge in streaming television and its hunger for content has made books an even more ubiquitous source of intellectual property for the small screen. And this TV season has been an apparent bonanza for the book adaptation business.
“I think books have never been more important, more respected,” says Sylvie Rabineau, senior partner & co-head of literary media, WME. “I think authors have never been more respected.”
Bryan Unkeless, producer of “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” the Netflix film version of Shelby Van Pelt’s odd couple-meets-octopus drama starring Sally Field and Lewis Pullman, agrees. “With the advent of BookTok, it allows you to have so much social chatter around these authors. They’re becoming new rock stars, in a way,” he says.
Unkeless has an additional theory. “The streamers are newer. They don’t have established libraries of ’80s and ’90s movies to reboot, and yet they’re still looking for familiarity of titles,” he says. “It’s one way to compete at an IP level.”
Emily Bader and Tom Blyth in “People We Meet on Vacation.”
(Daniel Escale / Netflix)
For all its pluses, Megan Gallagher, creator and showrunner of Peacock’s suburban thriller “All Her Fault” (from the novel by Andrea Mara), considers this craving for books “a double-edged sword.” She says, “I think broadcasters feel a certain safety when there’s a book, and I’m all for it if it helps the story get told. That said, I do worry a bit that as we rely more on IP, we are shortchanging writers who have original stories and that we are not getting those onto the air in a way that might really make TV more exciting.”
Where these bestselling authors fit into the adaptation process can vary. But within this current crop of TV movies and series, many novelists have been content to serve in a consultant capacity and leave the scripts to the screenwriters.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start when it comes to writing a script,” admits Van Pelt, who says she found the film’s team, led by director and co-scripter Olivia Newman, “so open and collaborative.” She adds, “As the author, getting the story right meant getting the characters right. And on that front, Olivia nailed it.”
Popular rom-com author Emily Henry, whose 2021 novel “People We Meet on Vacation” was made into a Netflix movie starring Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, was also happy with her role. “I really enjoyed getting to watch over everyone else’s shoulders and see what kind of changes they made and what elements of the story they butted up against,” says Henry. “By the end of the process, I definitely felt ready to adapt myself. But in the beginning, there was just no way I would raise my hand for it.”
Given the practical realities of production, honoring a literary source and its fan base can have its challenges. As “People” director Brett Haley notes, “You’re either looking at cutting and getting [the novel] down for a movie, or expanding it, lengthening it and getting it longer for a limited series.” He adds, “The movie or series is meant to exist alongside the book — it’s not meant to replace it.”
Kerry Washington in “Imperfect Women.”
(Stefania Rosini / Apple TV)
Annie Weisman, creator and showrunner of Apple TV’s mystery-thriller “Imperfect Women,” based on the book by Araminta Hall, explains, “In a novel, you have this easy access to the inner life of the characters through narration. So adapting it to the medium of TV … you need to give external and visual life to things that are more internal and narrational in the book.”
Adapting “Remarkably Bright Creatures” as a film also took its share of rethinking. “There’s not a lot of cause and effect between [main characters] Tova and Cameron in the book,” says Newman. “Their stories don’t really start to intersect until very late. We knew the [film] story had to be anchored in Tova and Cameron, but we really wanted them to have conflicting wants and needs that butted up against each other. And then, through their changing relationships, see how they were helping each other get closer to their goals.”
“Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” the endearingly quirky Apple TV series created by David E. Kelley from the novel by Rufi Thorpe, had its own adaptation hill to climb — one involving the baby that cash-strapped Margo (Elle Fanning) struggles to support by opening an OnlyFans account.
“On the page, the baby is a little bit of an abstraction,” says “Margo’s” executive producer Eva Anderson. “When we actually had these physical baby actors on set, we realized there’s stuff that Margo does in the book that she could not do on camera. If it seemed for one moment that she was disregarding the safety of the baby, we would lose the audience. Margo always had to be protecting the baby.”
Does the choice to turn such high-profile book titles as “Remarkably Bright Creatures” and “People We Meet on Vacation” into films instead of series suggest a shift back toward the made-for-TV movie? Not necessarily.
Says WME agent Rabineau, “We try to put the book together in the best possible way and then take it to market and see which buyer is most enthusiastic and whose creative vision aligns with the author and whatever other creative elements are attached.” She adds, “Really, it’s whatever the story requires, which is such a new way of thinking about projects.”
Or, as Unkeless puts it, “The book kind of tells you what it is.”
Credit: Source link