Scripting Out Cinematic Appeal

Two books that delineate the fruitful interrelationships between literature and film; the multi layered adaption of a novella and a collection of essays on the impact of movies on writers

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

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What do Dorothy Parker, William Saroyan, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, Edgar Wallace, Tom Stoppard, J. D. Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Advaita Kala, Gyan Prakash and Arundhati Roy have in common? They are literary writers who have also written movie screenplays. What do Alistair Maclean, Stephen King, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Mario Puzo and Satyajit Ray have in common? They have adapted their own stories for movies. Novelists and short-story writers have had an interesting relationship with movies, but predominantly it is their fascination with telling a good story that is the unifying factor.

Two unusual Indian publications dealing with this relationship of writers and film are Susanna's Seven Husbands and The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers In Susanna's Seven Husbands. The editors of Susanna's Seven Husbands have included Ruskin Bond's original five and a quarter page short story that is set on Rajpur Road, near the Delhi ridge. Naushad, the furniture maker, tells the narrator the story of Susanna Anna-Marie Yeates, "a much-married person with a quaint habit of disposing of her husbands whenever she tired of them." It also includes the sixty page novella which Ruskin Bond especially wrote at the request of Vishal Bhardwaj. It is set in Meerut, and tells the story of a beautiful, top of the heap woman who visits Wheeler club or strolls on the Mall Road but they are not sufficient distractions. So her life with the seven men is described. Ruskin Bond has clearly relished writing the novella for the screen as there are lovely references to classic movie moments. For instance, at the end Susanna's good bye to young Arun, ten years her junior, is such a well-known line from Casablanca, even a non-movie buff is likely to get it: "Well, here's looking at you," she says, and drives away. The novella has been turned into a screenplay by Vishal Bhardwaj and Matthew Robbins, who have shifted the setting from Delhi and Meerut to Mumbai and Goa. The juxtaposition of these three versions of the story-the Ruskin Bond original, his novella, and the screenplay-is a fascinating glimpse into how a story becomes layered, till it is ultimately converted into a visual form. It explains why we are often disappointed with a screen adaptation of a book. This screenplay is powerful and yet it is as if the spirit of the original story has been done away as it tries to be a desi CSI. Its Bollywood style ending enfeebles it further-the film Susanna becomes a nun which seems unfair to Bond's Susanna.

The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers
Edited By Jai Arjun Singh
Tranquebar Press, Westland
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The Popcorn Essayists is a collection of essays by writers reflecting on the impact of movies upon them, whether influencing their style of writing or their ways of seeing a new land. Manjula Padmanabhan in her essay, Jellyfish stresses on the passion for storytelling for the writer and the film maker and director. Narrating a good story and its impact on the viewer can be unforgettable. But as Kamila Shamsie points out in her essay, Two Languages, In Conversation, the frequency with which film makers use of novels as the basis for plot continues to create a link between the two art forms that sometimes serves to obscure how radically different they are. There is more similarity between the novels and film, and yet it is the latter pairing that has come to be seen as entwined. The entwining is, of course, one-sided: film embraces the novel; the novel accepts the embrace. Which is to say, no one claims a movie is 'a novel waiting to happen' and, while there are very occasionally novel tie-ins to film, those novels are always seen as languishing at the bottom of the literary totem pole.

All the essayists in The Popcorn Essayists, including the editor, Jai Arjun Singh agree that regardless of how well the story is told, the audiences remember the film. It could be in the roles being played by the actors, the cinematography or the direction, but it forever influences the person. A film, truly powerful in all such aspects, is the 1964 Russian adaptation of Shakespeare's <<Hamlet>>, based on a translation by Boris Pasternak. Writers like Namita Gokhale and Manil Suri too are so enamoured by films that they find themselves in peculiar situations. Namita Gokhale found herself behaving like a gushing fan when she met Rishi and Neetu Kapoor in the driveway of the Imperial hotel or as the mathematician Manil Suri who wanting to pay homage to his favourite star, imitates Helen's iconic dance fromCaravan, piya tu ab toh aaja in costume! It was after a reading to which he had been invited at the Brooklyn Book Festival in New York, in September 2008 that he said that "the catch was that, after the reading, each invited writer had to 'take a risk'-perform something on the public stage that they'd never done before."

Adapting a story to film or the impact of a film on a writer is a complex process and a very public affair when a film is made, but its impact on a person and their writing is a very personal experience. It can have a positive or a negative influence, but an influence, it certainly will. Even though, both the books, wonderful in their own right, have decent essays on the relationship between these two art forms, the inclusion of a conversation or two between an author and a film maker, instead of reflections would have been an added bonus. Hopefully this is only the beginning of a healthy discourse between the literary-types and film wallahs.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is a consultant editor

Friday, May 27, 2011