Past Programs
Film - 2007
Book to movie adaptations
05/10/2007
It is, of course, stating the completely obvious that many of the films we see on the big screen have their origins in places other than a film studio. Some screenplays have their seeds in familiar oral traditions, myths, fairy stories, historical tales and even computer games. Very often though, these stories have been adapted from the pages of books. But a book is NOT a screenplay and the fact that a story reads well on the page doesn't automatically mean it will translate to a coherent visual form on the screen. So are there easy ways to determine whether a good book will be a good basis for a film? So today on The Book Show, Ramona Koval speaks to film-maker Bruce Beresford and to Dr Simone Murray, who's devoted a great deal of time to research the relationship between these two forms.
Plus we hear from author Thomas Keneally, whose novel Schindler's Ark was adopted by Steven Spielberg and adapted to the screen, resulting in the remarkably successful film Schindler's List, an experience that seems to be a very rare moment for a writer. Since that time, Tom Keneally has pondered this relationship between book and film. And although Schindler's List was the result of chance events, which he describes as being much like a lightening strike, Tom feels that it is possible to create an environment where book publishers and film producers can share ideas about writing that has screen potential.
Creating Big Characters
03/08/2007
If you're in the business of writing stories, it's a fair bet that you'll be needing to populate these stories with characters. Sounds easy! You just need to plonk a few people in there -- a couple of cats, a budgie -- not a problem. But who are the people? What colour's the cat? Has the budgie got issues? Now it's starting to get really complicated. Where do you start?
And is it enough to create characters that are perfectly to scale? Without exaggeration, either physically or emotionally? Is an utterly 'true' character actually interesting on the page or the stage or the screen? Does a story in fact demand something different? Something bigger and more dramatic?
At the Byron Bay Writers Festival last Saturday, some creative folk pondered these questions, and so we thought that we could assemble our own focus group to enlighten us.
Stephen Sewell was on that panel in Byron Bay. He's one of our great playwrights and screenwriters, having constructed some very memorable characters for stage and screen. And even if you haven't seen any of Stephen's plays (his 2004 work Myth Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America - A Drama in 30 Scenes is the most awarded play in Australian history), you'd have been hard pressed to miss the AFI Award-winning film The Boys, a story full of violent ordinariness, cast on a terrifying scale.
Mary-Anne Fahey has been well known as a comedian and comedy writer for TV, and of course her character of the chewing gum twirling schoolgirl Kylie Mole is, quite simply, an Australian archetype. And Mary-Anne debuted as a novelist this year with her children's book called I, Nigel Dorking, about an unhappy young boy who escapes his suburban misery by rewriting his own life as the story of a brave knight.
And our third character artisan, writer Shane Maloney, is the man who brought us the scary and squalid world of state politics in the fabulously funny series of mystery books starring the rather inept, but strangely likeable character of Murray Whelan.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
13/05/2007
The American writer Caroline Weber talks to the Book Show about her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It is a biography told through wardrobe that captures the extravagance of Versailles and the political backlash against a monarch who played a life-long game of expensive dress-ups while her people starved – and then received the ultimate nip'n'tuck at the guillotine.
Caroline Weber joins Michael Gurr from a New York studio.
Queen of Fashion: Marie Antoinette Read Transcript
09/05/2007
The American writer Caroline Weber talks to the Book Show about her book Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It is a biography told through wardrobe that captures the extravagance of Versailles and the political backlash against a monarch who played a life-long game of expensive dress-ups while her people starved – and then received the ultimate nip'n'tuck at the guillotine.
Caroline Weber joins Michael Gurr from a New York studio.
Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen
25/03/2007
This year will see the release of no less than seven new film versions of Jane Austen's novels and other stories inspired by her work, including the controversial bio-pic Becoming Jane, which attempts to put to rest the view that Jane Austen was a prim and proper maid who never really experienced love at first hand.
In Becoming Jane, director Julian Jarrold has presented Jane Austen, played by the very becoming Anne Hathaway, as a girl with the same lusts and drives as any young women, but who is restrained by the etiquette of the age.
The film concentrates on a small part of Jane's life, when she was 21 years old and living with her family at Steventon in Hampshire. There she fell in love with handsome Irishman Tom Lefroy (played by James McAvoy), who could not afford to marry. We know through Jane's letters to her sister Cassandra that the pair danced together at balls, flirted, and then parted forever. Because little biographical record survives, that's all we know for sure.
However Jon Spence, American-Australian writer and author of 2003's Becoming Jane Austen—the biography on which the film is heavily based—has turned to the novels for insight. He says that there is no doubt that Tom was the love of Jane's life, and that the passionate heights and quick demise of that love fuelled and inspired all six of Jane's great romantic novels—from the young and lusty Pride and prejudice through to the darker and more mature Persuasion.
He says another figure to loom large in Jane's writerly imagination was her glamorous and flirtatious cousin Eliza de Feuillide, whose hot pursuit of Jane's dandyish brother Henry Austen occupied the writer's thoughts for years.
Jon Spence is speaking today from Sydney to The Book Show's Rhiannon Brown.
Becoming Jane's will be released on 29 March 2007.
Jon Spence's Becoming Jane Austen Read Transcript
22/03/2007
This year will see the release of no less than seven new film versions of Jane Austen's novels and other stories inspired by her work, including the controversial bio-pic Becoming Jane, which attempts to put to rest the view that Jane Austen was a prim and proper maid who never really experienced love at first hand.
