Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: The Art of Adaptation

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: The Art of Adaptation This week, we're going to be looking at Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, by August Wilson, adaptation by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.  I'm so excited to talk about this script, not just because it's a great movie, but because it's one of the great plays of all time. So that means, this episode, we get to talk about the link between playwriting and screenwriting, the similarities and the differences.  And more importantly, it means we can talk about the art of adaptation. If you're a screenwriter or TV writer, at some point in your career, you're going to do an adaptation, which means, just like the writer of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, you need the skills to know how to adapt a play, novel, memoir, short story, true story...heck even a board game into a movie or TV show. If you look at what's happening in the industry right now, most of the work-for-hire projects are based on something called IP, intellectual property. We're taking this thing that is not yet a movie, and we're translating it into something that is a movie or TV show.  I want you to focus on that word translation. An adaptation is not a copying of the plot. An adaptation is a translation of something that was written in one language into a different language.  And the art of adaptation is challenging, because as screenwriters, as writers we want to honor the work of the artists that we are adapting.  Even if you're doing something crazy, like adapting an amusement park ride like Pirates of the Caribbean, you want to honor what's great about that ride. If you're adapting The Lego Movie, you want to honor what's great about Legos. And if you're adapting a play, you want to honor what's great about the play.  And honoring what's great about the play, or the movie, or the video game, or the book, or the memoir, or the torn from the headline story, or your personal life story, or the dream you had last night... or even adapting the rough draft of your script. When you're doing this act of adaptation, you're translating something from one form to another.  And that means that you may not get all the literal details. Because the literal details were created for a different form. But what you're trying to capture is the intent.  The first question you want to ask yourself whenever you're working on an adaptation is: do I trust this material?  Do I trust this writer? Do I believe in this material? Do I generally like the project?  And that doesn't mean is the project good or not? It means does it resonate for you? Does it matter to you? And if it doesn't all resonate for you, you want to ask yourself, Well, what part of it does? What part of it do I really, really, really connect to?  If you think about The Lego Movie, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, my friends who adapted it, connected to this idea of playing by the rules, and also playing in your own way, right? That was the piece of Legos that connected them in a personal way. How do you express yourself, when “everything is awesome,” and playing within the rules makes everything awesome, but you also want to be a wild artist and do your own thing.  They took that one idea about Legos and they built around it. They decided they trusted the material, found the thing they connected to about it, and built around that. If you look at The Reader by David Hare, that's an adaptation of a book that is not very successful in its own right. The book is written by a lawyer and it's focused on the ins and outs of Nuremberg law. And underneath all the not-so-exciting details is this really complicated story about a little boy, who's in love with a woman who turns out to be a Nazi. She comes back into his life, later in life, and he has to deal with the fact that he loves her,