Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

At the request of an actor who’s interested in pitching my novel Today, Oh Boy to producers he’s worked with, I’ve written an adaptation of the novel for the screen.^[1] It’s not an official screenplay per se, but a roadmap for the actor to determine what scenes he will use to produce a short “teaser” reel consisting of would-be shots from the would-be movie. I have no idea how this is done. Via AI I suspect.  Anyway, with the final proofs from the novel to the right of my iMac’s screen and a blank Word document on the left, I began writing and cutting and pasting.

The good news is that originally, using present tense and employing crisp visual imagery, I consciously composed Today, Oh Boy to read like a movie progressing. For example, here’s the opening of the novel.

A mango-hued, pockmarked bulletin board hangs on a classroom wall of pale lime green concrete blocks, the bulletin board pencil-stabbed and compass point-gouged. Among the graffiti are the names of the star-crossed lovers: Sandy + Tripp. Tragic Tripp, whose body was found last week tangled in blackberry bushes along the banks of the Ashley River, his skull smashed after falling off Bacons Bridge.

S-A-N-D-Y + T-R-I-P-P.

Rusty Boykin, a skinny, freckled redhead sitting on the bulletin board row in Mrs. Laban’s homeroom, traces his index finger in the depression of Sandy’s name. He supposes it’s Tripp’s work – the letters inartistic, juvenile. Sandy hasn’t been to school since Tripp’s death, four class days ago, and now it’s Monday, and she’s still not here. She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist. 

How to adapt this for the screen?  One way, you could have Rusty tracing his finger in Sandy’s name and then suddenly cut to Tripp falling off the bridge, or you could begin with Tripp’s accident. What I did was to begin with Tripp’s last meeting with Sandy, a conversation through her open bedroom window, his leaving in a rage, jumping into his GTO, pealing off, and ultimately driving his car off the road at Bacons Bridge into the Ashley River.

Actually, Tripp’s death is what Hitchcock called a McGuffin, a misleading device that’s irrelevant to the overall narrative.  After all, Today, Oh Boy is a comedy. Its title comes from the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life.”

I read the news today oh boy

About a lucky man who made the grade

And though the news was rather sad

Well I just had to laugh 

So, by having Tripp drive off the bridge rather than falling off the bridge, what I gain in cinematic excitement, I lose in the comic pairing of his first and last names. As it turns out, Tripp was a bully, a high school version of Trump.  At one point in the book, Alex Jensen, a junior at Summerville high, says to a friend Will, “Your last name is Trotter, you name your son Tripp, and he falls off a bridge to his death. What a surprise.”

In addition, the novel employs a great deal of what critics call “indirect discourse,” a device that allows a narrator to report what someone is thinking without using his exact words. For example, in the above excerpt, the sentence, “She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist” is rendered second-hand through Rusty’s consciousness. In a screenplay, you have to “show” rather than tell “tell,” which can lead to really awkward exposition, like you find in bad fiction like “The Most Dangerous Game”:

You’ve good eyes,” said Whitney, with a laugh,” and I’ve seen you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall bush at four hundred yards, but even you can’t see four miles or so through a moonless Caribbean night.”

That I couldn’t use direct narration or indirect discourse meant I had to omit some characters, like Camilla Creel, the impoverished girl who lives in an abandoned school bus with her mother and sister, and Weeza Waring, Will’s mother, who added several comic touches throughout the narrative.

So, overall, the script is much tidier than the novel, much more streamlined, yet not as rich in my attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Summerville, South Carolina in 1970, during integration, the beginning of the counterculture, and during an influx of Northerners moving to what at the time was a staid, conservative community.

Then again, I’m sure a professional screenwriter could do a much better job.

^[1] By the way, it’s on sale at Amazon for a mere $10.