Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries Seminar Series 2011/12:
- 4pm-5.30pm, Wednesday, July 4, 2012
- Zen Room, The ATRiuM, University of Glamorgan, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff CF24 2FN
‘Scenes of marvelous variety:’ the work-in-progress screenplays of Maurice and Howards End.
Dr Suzanne Speidel (Sheffield Hallam University)
Abstract:
The novels of E. M. Forster have been adapted for film, television, radio and the stage. Most famously three of his novels were adapted for the big screen by the Merchant Ivory Productions (A Room with a View [1986], Maurice [1987] and Howards End [1992]). The rights to the works of E. M. Forster are held by the novelist’s Almer Mater, Kings College, Cambridge, and in recognition of the College’s role in granting the screen rights for adaptation, director James Ivory donated a series of work-in-progress screenplays to the E.M. Forster Papers, held within the College’s archives.
Whilst academic writing on film adaptation has frequently proposed the metaphor of the palimpsest as a means of theorizing adaptation, these screenplays are often themselves palimpsestuous texts: they show the evolution of the screenplays across several different versions, from treatments through to the scripts used for shooting. At times they are also literally cut-and-pasted, allowing the reader to detect hidden, early versions underneath later additions and amendments.
In this paper I shall examine the writing processes revealed within the work-in-progress screenplays by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James Ivory for the films Maurice and Howards End. The manuscripts reveal both extensive narrative revisions, as well as previously concealed authorial dialogues, contributions and collaborations. A comparison between the various screenplays of the two films – the latter by Prawer Jhabvala, Merchant Ivory’s long-term collaborator, the former co-scripted by Ivory and first-time screenwriter Hesketh-Harvey – also sheds light on how these two creative processes differed.
This paper seeks to illuminate the narratives’ journeys from page to screen, which were not straight trajectories, but a series of, sometimes circuitous, evolutions, away from and back towards, the original story. It will examine what is suggested within the screenplay manuscripts about the creativity of two, often under-valued authorial acts, namely collaborative writing and narrative adaptation.
Dr Suzanne Speidel is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.
This seminar is free and open to all. Please contact Dr Huw D Jones for more details, or visit: http://drama.research.glam.ac.uk/events/2012/jul/04/seminar-suzanne-speidel/