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Film Adaptation and Its Discontents
This page intentionally left blank
Film Adaptation
and Its Discontents
From Gone with the Wind to
The Passion of the Christ

Thomas Leitch

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
© 2007 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2007
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leitch, Thomas M.
Film adaptation and its discontents : from Gone with the Wind
to The Passion of the Christ / Thomas Leitch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-8018-8565-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-8018-8565-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Film adaptations—History and criticism. I. Title.
pn1997.85.l35 2007
791.43′6—dc22 2006037744

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
To Barbara T. Gates and James M. Welsh
mentors • colleagues • friends
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Literature versus Literacy 1

2 One-Reel Epics 22

3 The Word Made Film 47

4 Entry-Level Dickens 67

5 Between Adaptation and Allusion 93

6 Exceptional Fidelity 127

7 Traditions of Quality 151

8 Streaming Pictures 179

9 The Hero with a Hundred Faces 207

10 The Adapter as Auteur 236

11 Postliterary Adaptation 257

12 Based on a True Story 280

Notes 305
Bibliography 325
Index 339
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

Like so many film teachers of my generation, I was trained in literary studies

and drifted into film studies through a mixture of infatuation and happen-
stance. Given my background and interests, film adaptation would have
seemed a logical focus for my work. But I was slow to come to the study of adap-
tation. I was convinced that George Bluestone had said everything necessary
on the subject years before. I agreed with Dudley Andrew’s implication that
adaptation study as it was currently practiced wasn’t especially interesting. And
I didn’t realize that anyone since Bluestone had added anything significant to
the debate between medium-specific theorists who focused, as Seymour Chat-
man put it, on what novels could do that films couldn’t (and vice versa) and re-
viewers for whom the book was always better.
I owe my interest in adaptation to Barbara Gates and Jim Welsh. In thank-
ing Jim, the founding editor of Literature/Film Quarterly for over three de-
cades, I echo the thanks of dozens of scholars he has encouraged to take a closer
look at books and movies. Although the citations in this volume duly record
some of my debts to the leading theorists of adaptation since Bluestone—Brian
McFarlane, Deborah Cartmell, Imelda Whelehan, Robert Ray, Robert Stam,
James Naremore, Sarah Cardwell, Kamilla Elliott—I remain convinced that
Jim has worked harder than anyone else for a longer period to keep interest in
adaptation studies alive, and I’m proud that, for nearly twenty years, my own
work has had the benefit of his midwifery.
Five years ago, Barbara Gates encouraged me to join her in team-teaching a
course in adaptations of Victorian novels, even though she knew that I had no
appetite for either team-teaching or adaptation. Midway through the term, she
urged me to apply with her to the Salzburg Seminar’s Session 403, From Page
to Screen, and then withdrew her own application so that it would not com-
pete with mine. Her extraordinary generosity paid me rich dividends at
x Acknowledgments

Salzburg, where I joined a group of sixty scholars and filmmakers taught by

Steven Bach, Peter Lilienthal, Gerald Rafshoon, Richard Schickel, and David
Thacker. I can never repay the debts I incurred at the session, but I’d like to
record my obligation to the fellow students from whom I learned the most:
Martina Anzinger, Mireia Aragay, Slawomir Bobowski, Derek Chase, Karen
Diehl, Lindiwe Dovey, Scott Eyman, Lynn Higgins, Michael Kitson, Irina
Makoveeva, Sohail Malik, Margaret McCarthy, Mohi-Ud-Din Mirza, Manjiri
Prabhu, Tatiana Smorodinska, and Alexie Tcheuyap. On my return to Amer-
ica, Slawomir Bobowski, Mireia Aragay, and Lynn Higgins offered me the op-
portunity to try my hand at three essays—“The Word Made Film,” Studia Fil-
moznawcze 25 (2004); “The Adapter as Auteur: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Disney,”
Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2004); and “Post-Literary Adaptation,” PostScript 23, no. 3 (summer 2004)—
which, variously revised and expanded, became the bases of chapters 3, 10, and
11 of this book.
In the meantime Kathryn Osenlund had kindly invited me to give the
keynote presentation at the Pennsylvania College Educators Association and
introduced me to John Desmond and Peter Hawkes, whose passion for the sub-
ject spurred my own. In response I pressed many friends to help me during an-
nual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Literature/
Film Association. I’m particularly obliged to Richard Allen, Lesley Brill, Linda
Costanzo Cahir, David Kranz, Peter Lev, Nancy Mellerski, Walter Metz, Sarah
Miles Watts, and Donald Whaley for helping me identify and analyze hereto-
fore neglected problems in adaptation.
At the University of Delaware, students in my graduate course on adapta-
tion offered me a laboratory for my ideas and provided a constant stream of
intellectual challenges. And two of my PhD students, David DeMare Stivers and
Kathleen Newell, helped me work out problems with my chapter on adaptation
and auteurism. It was a special honor to work with Kate on her prize-winning
dissertation, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Adaptation,” at the
same time that I was pondering many of the same questions on my own. The
greater part of this book was drafted during a sabbatical leave I was awarded
for 2004– 5. Cheryl Kingan introduced me to the mysteries of Walt Disney
World, and Allison Thibert-Bragg provided a timely and welcome bit of last-
minute help.
Of the many people who helped bring the book to press, I am especially
 Acknowledgments xi

grateful to Michael Lonegro, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press,

who supplied its title, and Joe Abbott, my manuscript editor, who added three
footnotes and three thousand corrections.
Finally, I humbly thank Lisa Elliott for sitting through all those Sherlock
Holmes movies with me and Gardner Campbell for suggesting, in response to
a conference paper I gave on literacy ten years ago, that it needed a little some-
thing more to be complete. Well, Gardner, here it is.
This page intentionally left blank
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