By Mursi Saad El-Din Adapting literary works for the screen gives rise to a perennial controversy. We have seen many canonical works adapted for the screen, among them Dickens's Oliver Twist, Bront�'s Wuthering Heights, Austen's Emma, Taha Hussein's The Call of the Nightingale, Tharwat Abaza's A Little of Fear and Naguib Mahfouz's Miramar. In the process it is almost inevitable that the multiple perspectives possible within the novel form will be lost though, as Sanaa Selaiha recently argued in Al- Ahram, such losses may be compensated for by the appeal to a far wider audience. In some cases, though, the process of adaptation has led to such major changes that writers, or their heirs, have taken out court cases against the filmmaker. Other writers accept the changes, understanding the difference between the written and the visual. Naguib Mahfouz, many of whose novels have been turned into films, has never questioned the abbreviations made in the film version of his novels. The International Herald Tribune recently published an article by Louis Begley, author of About Schmidt, which was made into a film of the same title. In the article Begley enumerates the changes made to his novel. The two writers of the screenplay were worried that the author would resent the changes. They screened the picture for Begley and his wife. After the show, he writes, "I told them immediately that I would have been proud to have written their book." Begley asks why was his response so benevolent. "Wouldn't I have vastly preferred a screen version of About Schmidt that was faithful to it?" What made him accept the adaptation is that "for all the radical changes in the plot and milieu, my most important themes were treated with great intelligence and sensitivity." He describes the changes as "rather like melodies transposed into a different key". Begley's acceptance of the screen version was also helped by his long-standing admiration for Jack Nicholson, who plays the role of Schmidt. Indeed, at one point he writes that nothing could have been better than to see Nicholson "create my Schmidt on the screen", adding that when the coproducer of the film was negotiating on his novel he became "putty in his hands as soon as he said that he wanted to pursue Nicholson for the role of the protagonist". Begley goes on to elucidate fundamental differences between the novel and film. In film there is an inevitable need to simplify: it must convey its message through images and relatively few words; it has little tolerance for irony, and through images "conveys a vast amount of information that words can only attempt to approximate". In the same Herald issue is an article by Richard Cunninglam, author of The Hours, a novel in which Virginia Woolf is a central character. Cunninglam concentrates not so much on changes but on the "dizzying" cast and the ability of the actresses to personify the novel's protagonists. While he could have no doubts about the three chosen actresses abilities, he wondered "if they'd be too thoroughly themselves, no matter how accomplished their performance". Cunninglam explains how, as he watched the process of filming, he came to the conclusion that "the process of transformation in a role" is as elusive and idiosyncratic as the creation of characters in fiction. "As I watched the women do their work and when I saw the finished movie I understood that what you lose in turning fiction into film -- the ability to enter your characters' minds, and to scan their pasts for keys to their features -- can be compensated for by actors." "And so," Cunninglam concludes, "I find myself in an enviable if slightly embarrassing position as one of the only living American novelists happy about his experience with Hollywood... It is as if people dear to me had died, and I find myself meeting them afterward, in other bodies, and simply knowing from their gestures and their eyes, from some ineluctable familiarity, that these are they, returned."
