Adaptations Part Four: the Oddballs!
Those adaptations that come from unconventional sources or had a bizarro ride onto the page and screen.
As usual: What are your thoughts on your favorite oddball type adaptation? What things were left out? Added in? Combined? Simplified? And if you helmed it, what would you have done?
And the works in question…
First: a theme park ride, Pirate of the Caribbean. There’s movement, spectacle, a start, middle, and end… and perhaps in that spectacle there’s a story. I haven’t been on the ride myself, however, if you have, perhaps you could share how “faithful” it is. For instance, does it take some of the visuals?
Second, a production hell with a tie-in game, Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever. Or just Ecks vs Sever for the game which, due to said production issues, came out first and was based on an earlier than final screenplay draft. This led many to believe the movie was a game adaptation. Production troubles continued right up to the release, resulting in a movie disaster everyone blames on someone else. And the reasonably received game that faded due to release only on one console, Game Boy Advance.
Third, a meta adaptation, Adaptation. The lead actor played an adaptation of the writer and his fictional twin brother, so the writer was credited as ”Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman,” yet Donald was a fictional character created for the film, which is, in fact, an adaptation, but the source material is the B-plot. The A-plot is the actual adaptation process of the writer, thus taking this into meta territory. It’s wild, but I loved it. There are plenty of in-jokes about screenwriting.
Do you know any others? Drop your thoughts.
