Adapting For Film
Literature, other works, and life stories have been adapted for film from the dawn of the industry. In an early example, the filmed version of The Brothers Grimm story Cinderella was released as Cinderella by Georges Méliès in 1899. The 1900 film Sherlock Holmes Baffled featured Arthur Conan Doyle's detective character Sherlock Holmes intruding upon a pseudo-supernatural burglary. The film, considered the first detective movie, ran for only 30 seconds and was originally intended to be shown in hand-cranked Mutoscope machines.
Georges Méliès' 1902 original science-fiction feature A Trip to the Moon was based loosely on two popular novels of the time: Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon. The first of many adaptations of the Brothers Grimm tale Snow White was released in 1902 while the earliest surviving copy is the 1916 version. 1903 saw the release of Alice in Wonderland directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, the first movie adaptation of Lewis Carroll's children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
The first feature-length film to be shot entirely in Hollywood was Cecil B. DeMille's first assignment—The Squaw Man, which was the first of three movie versions (all helmed by DeMille) based on Edwin Milton Royle's play of the same name.
The most celebrated of the early adaptations is Erich von Stroheim's Greed, a 1924 adaptation of the 1899 novel McTeague by naturalist writer Frank Norris. The director intended to film every aspect of the novel in great detail, resulting in a 9½-hour epic feature. At studio insistence, the film was cut down to two hours and was considered a flop upon its theatrical release. It has since been restored to just over four hours and is considered one of the greatest films ever made.
Read more about this topic: Literary Adaptation
Famous quotes containing the words adapting and/or film:
“But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself.”
—V.S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad)