Daniel Wallace, who wrote the book
> The best adaptations are inspired by the source material, not dictated by it. The screenwriter doesn’t work for the author; he takes possession of the story, and owns it as much as the novelist does. If not, if there is even a hint of subservience, the adaptation and the movie it hopes to become will suffer, and sometimes die a grisly, unliterary death. And if you’ve never seen an unliterary death it’s a sad thing to watch.
Discussing the very talky opening scene of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin makes a key point about how writers [dole out information](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/aaron-sorkins-writing-process-69586):
> We started at 100 miles an hour in the middle of a conversation, and that makes the audience have to run to catch up. […]The worst crime you can commit with an audience is telling them something they already know. We were always running ahead.
Figuring out what the audience needs to know — and when they need to know it — is one of the trickiest aspects of screenwriting. The novelist can suspend the action for paragraphs or pages to establish background information. Screenwriters can’t. We don’t have an authorial voice to fill in the missing details. Everything we want the audience to know has to be spoken by a character, or better yet visualized in a way that suits the big screen. ((As a trade-off for losing the authorial voice, movies get something good in return: the audience’s complete attention. You don’t skim a movie the way you might a 400-page novel. Tiny moments can have huge impact on the big screen.))
So we have to be clever. Sometimes, we use the form to our advantage: A lengthy sequence explaining dinosaur cloning techniques in Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park becomes an animated film strip in David Koepp’s movie adaptation. In most cases, we do more with less, distilling the information down to a minimum effective dose to get the audience through the scene, sequence and story.
The frustration for screenwriters is that many of the decision-makers — directors, producers, studio executives — will have different opinions about that minimum effective dose. Directors will try to cut all the dialogue. Producers will focus on strange details, having read the script so many times that they’ve lost fresh eyes. And studio executives, having faced confused audiences at low-scoring test screenings, will want things over-explained to painful degrees.
But that’s politics. In terms of craft, Sorkin’s point holds: you engage the audience by making them work. One of the best ways is by understanding and controlling what they know.
So, I understand the merits of re-making movies from the past, or making old TV shows into features. I also get it from a studios perspective inasmuch as it’s a known property that has a fanbase, or has made a profit in the past.
But when I see studios making adaptations of toys like “Magic 8 Ball” or “Battleship” or “Stretch Armstrong” it really bums out the aspiring writer in me. It makes me think Hollywood doesn’t want my original idea. Can you talk me down from the ledge?
— Logan
Los Angeles
Logan, I’m right there on the ledge with you. But when you look down past your shoelaces, you realize that it’s not rocks and crashing waves below. The ledge we’re standing on is about eight feet high. At the bottom is concrete.
Jump wrong, and it’s going to be painful. Jump carefully, and you’ll be fine.
Yes, I rolled my eyes when the “Battleship” movie was announced. But I’ll happily see a modern naval war movie, and if it has to be named after a Milton Bradley property, so be it. A hidden upside to writing a movie based on just a title is that the screenwriter has huge latitude, unlike a book or TV adaptation.
Pendulums swing. It was dumb to make a movie out of a theme park ride before Pirates of the Caribbean. This trend towards making movies out of properties with no inherent narrative will eventually end. (A big success from an original like Inception might help.) In the meantime, let’s root for the best versions of these projects.
Good movies are a blessing, regardless of the source.
I’m currently writing a spec-pilot loosely based on a novel — not a best-seller, but one people have read. I plan on sending out queries to agents to try and get represented, but I don’t know if I need to ask permission by the author to use the ideas expressed in the novel.
The idea I’m borrowing is basically “the assistant works for the evil boss” and I don’t plan on using the same character names. I also intend on adding more characters and plots. But…and a big but, is I want to keep the title of the book as the title of the show. Seeing as nothing is really the same, I’m confused if I need to ask permission.
— Quentin
Essex, Iowa
There’s no gray area here. You are flat-out stealing, and brazenly at that. Stop.
You have a few options at this point. First and least defensibly, you can change so many of the details (and the title!) that the story feels like it’s “in the vein of” but not actually based on the book in question. National Treasure isn’t based on Dan Brown’s books, but it’s comfortably and legally within the same microgenre. It’s not the same story, but it’s the same kind of story.
In your case, there’s endless precedent for evil bosses. Do you own version. Don’t crib anything from the book at all.
A second choice is to actually get the rights. This feels like a longshot — why would a somewhat-successful author give an unproduced writer the right to adapt his book for TV? But it sometimes happens. I’ve [written about](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/book-optioned) how to do it.
A third choice is to simply acknowledge on the title page, “Based on the novel Title by This Author.” This doesn’t give you the right to make this pilot. You couldn’t sell it. You couldn’t produce it. But you could feel reasonably secure that no one would come after you, the same way legions of Buffy fan-fic writers don’t worry about Joss Whedon sending cease-and-desist orders. Particularly in television, there’s industry precedent for scripts that are simply writing samples. That’s what you’d have.