Adaptation

Well, I just sent off my partials to five agents, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my baby finds favor with one or two of the agents that I sent it to. I feel confident that it's the best shape possible, and a few reads by several people who's word I trust. I've almost finished my other partial, but I've been thinking about how whether or not to do another Shakespeare adaptation.

One of my favorite movies is 10 Things I Hate About You with Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger. To me it's the perfect adaptation of Taming of the Shrew set in a high school. I don't think I could top that, even though it's a movie and I'm writing a novel. I would have to do a reverse gender sort of thing and have Kent be the Shrew and Patricia be the Tamer (get it Kate/Kent, Petruchio/Patricia). Romeo and Juliet would be an obvious choice but again it makes me think of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, plus in the movie and the play they end up dead. A bit of a downer for a novel, unless they just break up at the end.

Other possibilities include Much Ado or Tempest. I'm trying to avoid the plays where the heroine has to dress up as a boy unless of course it's on stage for a play. That I could swing.

What all this thinking has done is made me realize just how hard it can be to adapt something for a contemporary audience. For ever Clueless, there's also a Wuthering Heights. Did anyone see this dreck on MTV a few years ago with Erika Christensen and some guy who's name I can't even remember? It was god awful but pretty.

So here are a few of my favorite adaptations:

1. Clueless - Amy Heckerling's version of Emma is priceless. I've watched it over and over again, and it's still pleasurable.

2. Ten Things I Hate About You - Heath Ledger. Enough said.

3. Cruel Intentions - the original version not the straight to video sequels. This is the movie where Ryan Phillipe and Reese Witherspoon fall in love. Who would have thought that an epistolary novel would adapt so well to a snooty New York prep school and the cruel intentions of two students? Gossip Girl owes a lot to this movie.

4. O - This was the version of Shakespeare's Othello set in a boarding school with Julia Stiles that was delayed from being released because of the shootings at Columbine.

Wow, that's not alot. It just goes to show you that adapting is incredibly hard. If you've read Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, and then seen Adaptation, you have a pretty good idea why that movie was so spot on.