I was watching the movie Villain. It had the following writing credits:
Screenplay by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais
Adaptation by Al Lettieri
Of a Novel The Burden of Proof by James Barlow
Now if Barlow wrote the original novel (which was based on the life of Ronnie Kray) and Clement and La Frenais (they’ve worked as a pair) wrote the screenplay, what exactly was Lettieri’s role? Did he actually write anything?
Probably not relevant but Lettieri was better known as an actor. He specialized in playing gangsters and was cast as Turk Sollozzo in The Godfather.
There are writers who condense down a book to a “treatment” which can then be better-translated to the framework of a script. This is also known as the adaptation.
It involves breaking the book down into a probable outline of the plot without being concerned with actual dialogue which can be added later.
In addition to the possibility of what **Gilles de Rais **says, it could be a case where Lettieri wrote an initial draft of the screenplay, but it was rewritten significantly, but not significantly enough for him to completely lose credit. It most likely went to arbitration.
Here’s the WGA’s official position on the ‘adaptation’ credit:
“This credit is appropriate in certain unusual cases where a writer shapes the direction of screenplay construction without qualifying for “Screenplay by” credit. In those special cases, and only as a result of arbitration, the “Adaptation by” credit may be used.”
It seems strange to me that what appears to have been summarizing a book written by somebody else so that two other people could write it in script form can be regarded as a creative work.
Adapting a book (often hundreds of pages) to a 2-hr movie is not easy. Plot lines have to be condensed, characters and incidents need to be changed or eliminated, exposition has to be cleaner & more concise, themes and ending often need to be altered. The treatment isn’t just summarizing a book, but the original key in showing how you take something literary and convert it into something cinematic.
Basically, it means he wrote the first screenplay. Then Dick Clement rewrote things, jettisoning most of the dialog but retaining the plot. Ian Les Fresnais then did another rewrite. By this time, most of Letteri’s screenplay was gone, but his structure remained. He was able to get adaptation credit because of that.
This assumes you wrote the credits correctly. There’s a big difference in writing credits using “and” (which means two screenwriters worked independently – usually one after another) and using “&” (which means two screenwriters working together as a team).
For whatever reason, he looked more like an accountant than a gangster to me in “The Godfather.” But he looked twice as big and bad in “Mr Majestyk” and “The Getaway.”
Speaking of getting credit for apparently not doing much, how is it that the ten millionth cop show with the same type of stories we’ve seen for 50 years is “created by” anybody?
And when there are a dozen “executive producers,” what do they do?
Someone created the the characters for the beginning of the show and the book (the basic backstory and personality) for all of them. Later episodes are using variations on what was originally created.
There’s usually only one executive producer for a TV show – he or she is the one who manages the entire enterprise. However, there are many other producers who handle other important functions like maintaining the budget and hiring behind-the-scenes talent. For a TV series, there is a producer for each episode (though they rotate among a small group) who handles it for each, as well as producers for the entire series, and others who have other business-oriented roles.
Even less relevant: I think they should do an episode of Mad Men in which you find their former employee Salvatore Romano was the Turk’s gay illegitimate son.
I appreciate that the book must be distilled (or even reduced, to switch analogies, in the case of a very good treatment) rathered than summarized. But is that really ‘converting it into something cinematic’? I would have thought a more image-based role would be credited with that.
Dick Clement & Ian la Frenais have been a script writing team since the early 60s. They’ve done loads of UK tv series and also various feature films…
I’ve only linked to one of their wiki pages, but it starts with a list of their collaborations; not sure they’ve actually done stuff separately!
To sidetrack, Myself and a friend saw the theatrical release last night of restored The Fellowship Of The Rings, the most bizarre credits ensued, at the end there was:
Charter Members Of The Lord Of The Rings Fan Club:
I’m once saw a terrible comedy with five credited writers sharing something like two ampersands and one “and” between them. Someday the movie industry will invent another abbreviation for “and” to further fine-tune the details of endlessly rewritten awful scripts.
The credits are reversed obviously (although it probably wasn’t as obvious on screen when you couldn’t freeze the frame). I think they’re people who had walk-on roles in the movie although some of them might also have been crew members. (And Frodis is a drug reference not a reversal of Sidorf.)
It doesn’t reflect very well on Bob Rafelson. He apparently was using the movie to denounce the artificiality of the Monkees in an effort to show he was moving on to more serious work. But while Rafelson himself who was one of the creators of the television series, it’s the Monkees who are the target of his denunciation. I feel it was unfair of him to blame the performers for doing the job he asked them to do. If Rafelson had become embarrassed by the Monkees, then he should have apologized for it not tried to dump the blame on them.
And the movie also demonstrates that working while you’re stoned out of your mind only seems like a good idea when you’re stoned out of your mind.
The writer doesn’t typically break the script down into shots, but it does require some skill to write a script that CAN be broken down into shots.
I recently had to reject a writer for a videogame that I’m working on because he wasn’t good with visual storytelling. (His background was as a novelist.) His dialog was great, but his scenes were very static and he kept relying on the authorial voice to convey important information. The script read just fine, but it was obvious that it would have to undergo major revisions before it could be storyboarded. In the end we wound up going with a different writer who had more experience writing cutscenes.
I saw that movie when I was 10 or 12 years old. I laughed so hard I could not breath. I had no idea that human beings could be that funny. When I first saw Monty Python I thought “well they’re darn funny, but they aren’t Head”
Years later, in my 40’s I watched it again.
Oh. My. God.
It was so bad it makes the David Niven Casino Royale look like Citizen Kane, what the hell was I smoking/drinking/thinking when I was 10?
If you’re not directly involved with the process it might be difficult to understand how very different literature or story writing that is meant to be read is different from screenwriting that is meant as a guide for visual presentation. There’s a lot that has to go on, including, as a first step, a major winnowing away of plots, characters, situations, etc., in order to make a subject handle-able for performed or filmed presentation. In this case, it has been broken up into smaller chunks that each requires different types of skills. The adaptation takes a story and makes the first crack at reforming it so that it can be translated into a visual presentation. It will act as an outline or guide for the screenwriters to flesh out with actual dialogue, stage directions, and descriptions of visual sequences.
