Paper Topic #1: Screen Adaptation Assignment

The American West and the Historical Imagination
Screen Adaptation Assignment

For this assignment choose either Option A: Screenplay, Option B: Novelization.
Option A: Fiction/NonFiction into Film

Your assignment is to write your own screenplay or portion of a screenplay adapting a novel or historical episode to film. The texts you should use are Its Your Misfortune, Deadwood or Bent’s Fort. The best plan would be to read all of the book before selecting a section, chapter, or scene to work with. Read the book carefully and select a scene or a sequence of scenes that you can imagine cinematically or visualize projected on a movie screen in your head. You may have to read the section several times to come to know it well enough to fully comprehend its significance in the novel and to write a film version of it.

The screenplay or screenplay portion you produce should include a brief explanation of the context for the scene you are adapting and the scene itself written in script format. Also feel free to consult these screenplays in the Main Library, though this step is not necessary.
Field, Syd. Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay
Field, Syd. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
Horton, Andrew. Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay
Scorese, Martin. The Age of Innocence: The Shooting Script

You should remember that you will be trying to make us understand what the camera sees and shows us; it is not enough to repeat what's in the novel with a suggestion that that's what we're seeing--try to make the screenplay cinematic by imagining how to use the camera to tell the story or dramatize the action. The paper should run 6 pages, typed, double-spaced. The final draft of the paper will be due April 26, 2004.

If you are doing a screenplay, follow these guidelines:

1. The paper should run 6 pages, typed, double-spaced. (It's okay if it runs longer--you'll likely have a lot of white space.) If you would like to work with a partner(s) on a script that is fine, just make sure to add 6 pages of length to your final script for each member of the group.

2. The paper should have a title centered on page 1 with your name centered two lines below it.
3. The paper should begin with a section titled Introduction which runs three-quarters of a page to two pages in length and explains where in the play your screenplay is taken from and what has happened in your screenplay just before the scene you've written begins. END THE INTRODUCTION WITH THREE ASTERISKS (* * *) CENTERED ON THE PAGE.
4. OPTIONAL: If you need to add an afterword to the paper, to explain what happens after your scene or scenes, separate the afterword by three asterisks.
5. Remember that you are adapting the play and are free to make changes that you need to in order to make a better screenplay.

Option B: Film Into Fiction

The point of this assignment is to help you to a better understanding of the difficulty in imagining the American West in writing. For this assignment you can use the film Jeremiah Johnson or an episode of Deadwood (if you would like feel free to choose with my approval another film about the American West to write about). Your task then is to write in fiction form a scene from film. Your best approach would be to see or see again a DVD or video of the film, select a scene that is representative of the whole or a crucial moment in someway and try to write it as a novelist would.

The fiction excerpt you produce should include an explanation of the context for the scene you are adapting and the scene itself written in fiction format. You should remember that you will be trying to take the place of the camera; it is not enough to describe what happens on the screen--you will have to make the prose sufficient to give us all the information we need and to provoke the kind of response in prose that the film is (perhaps) provoking in images and cinematography. The paper should run 4 pages, typed, double-spaced.

Follow these guidelines:

1. The paper should run 4-5 pages, typed, double-spaced.
2. The paper should have a title centered on page 1 with your name centered two lines below it.
3. The paper should begin with a section titled Introduction which runs three-quarters of a page to two pages in length and explains where in the screenplay your novelization is taken from and what has happened in your novelization just before the scene or chapter you've written begins. END THE INTRODUCTION WITH THREE ASTERISKS (* * *) CENTERED ON THE PAGE.
4. The novelization should begin two spaces after the asterisks and follow a format similar to the fictions we've read in the class. It should read like fiction, not like a screenplay or a description of what is happening in a movie while you're watching it.
5. OPTIONAL: If you need to add an afterword to the paper, to explain what happens after your scene or scenes, separate the afterword by three asterisks.
6. Remember that you are adapting the screenplay and are free to make changes that you need to in order to make a better novel.