A scene from Graveyard Days, a film adaptation of Daniel Wallace's short story.
Adaptation
Duke students work with local authors to turn the page into screen and stage
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Durham, NC -- Elisabeth Benfey calls her filmmaking class, “christening by digital fire.” Benfey worked this past spring with writer and Duke faculty member Michael Malone to produce “A Sense of Place,” a collaborative project between her filmmaking class and his adaptation class. In just a few weeks her students made films from three short stories Malone’s students had adapted in his “page to stage and screen” class.
Malone’s writing students also created a short play about a funeral adapted from a chapter of a novel. The final program showcasing all the work was called Three Movies and a Funeral.
Malone’s students studied the art of narrative adaptation, examining how fiction is successfully, or unsuccessfully, translated from one medium to another. Malone’s connections to local writers allowed the students to work with several well-known authors.
Noted writers Lee Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies), Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All), and Daniel Wallace (Big Fish) contributed short stories, and Oscar Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) contributed a chapter of a novel to be adapted, and they all came to speak to the adaptation class.
“The visits from the writers were real added value,” Benfey said. “All four writers were very generous. They gave the students insights on what prompted them to write that particular story at that particular time, and they all gave permission and encouragement for the students to make the writing theirs.”
The filmmaking students had to find a way to convey the stories using pictures. They broke down the script, created storyboards, wrote shot-lists and cast the scenes of their short films with students from both classes. They rehearsed and directed the scenes with an emphasis on camera placement for optimal coverage and all in all experienced the fluid and collaborative nature of filmmaking.
The writers followed the process with interest. “One of the things I like most about writing fiction is that so many things can happen to it after it leaves home,” said Daniel Wallace, whose Graveyard Days was adapted by the class. “Seeing a written narrative become a film is the ultimate compliment, because a group of people have gotten together and decided that something about this story is worthwhile and deserves to be seen and understood in another context.
“I love to let the story go, love to see what others will do to it, because the story—my story —doesn't change. In fact, no matter how the film turns out, its existence serves to enlarge the story. And let's face it, it's just plain fun. Adam [Barron, the director] and the rest of them did a fantastic job,” he added. “I want to do it again.”
Allan Gurganus said he enjoyed the raucous laughter that greeted the student production of his story Nativity, Caucasian. “I wrote this story just 10 years out of high school. It was meant as a lovesong to all the pretty able women my mother's age. I loved them all. They could and should have run multi-nationals.
“Instead, they played killer bridge and made exceptional refreshments for Cub Scout troops, Kiwanis picnics and card tournaments. The Duke students' film provided a generational frame from which these women might be more richly appreciated. The student actors' high energy onscreen was just right, both broadly comic and deeply respectful of these lives so unlike their own.”
Malone’s students turned a chapter from Oscar Hijuelos’s Voices from the Last World into a play. “I think the class did a terrific job given the monologue-like limitations of the original segments taken from the novel—which was a series of voices speaking intimately to the reader,” Hijuelos said.
“All in all, it was fully enjoyable, and I have since thought that some parts of it could be opened up (like the Queen Isabella scene, which was tremendous fun), others tweaked; but it has tremendous potential, as do many of the actors and actresses, who were just exciting to watch, their energy being contagious. What else can I say? I hardly ever revisit my work, and felt privileged to be a part in such a nice production.”
The students enjoyed the process as well. “As a writer, I think my favorite part of this class was that it gave me an opportunity to explore all the steps that come after writing, to watch what's been written transform from dialogue on the page to conversation, to see
25 takes for one 10-second scene, to even act a little myself,” said Emily Neeves, a student in Malone’s adaptation class. “I've always imagined my own fiction, when I'm writing it, as if the story were a movie replaying in my head. I loved that in this class I didn't have to imagine that part; when it was all said and done, I got to see something I helped write change form.”
“I was delighted the students got to feel the enchantment in watching their words—dialogue and descriptions that they have put on pieces of paper—start magically to take on their separate lives as actors and camera angles and music, as sets, costumes and props,” Malone said. “Usually what we see produced of our writing is a surprising gift, sometimes a small shock, but it is always proof of collaborative imagination, energy and passion.”
Benfey said she learned a lot in the collaboration. “I would love to do it again but would like for the production to be from the get-go instead of halfway into the semester,” she said. “Because the adapting and filmmaking happened the same semester, it was a bit rushed from the filmmaking end. I would like to have more time to develop the process. But everybody pitched in—by the last draft, directors worked with writers and all got a lot of experience, from acting in front of a camera to producing, directing, and filming. We can improve the process. But without a doubt, the students and writers all had a positive experience.”
