Imagine you’ve written the screenplay for a movie that doesn’t get picked up by a studio but someone has the bright idea that this screenplay, lightly transformed, would make for a good TV series. You’d have to re-couch it in terms of what goes into each episode instead of imagining what the plot arc for a self-contained movie with a beginning, a middle, and an end, would be. You’d need to bear in mind, for example, what would happen if the series takes off but the original plot for the movie is concluded..
I have two movies in mind, both recently viewed, the China Syndrome and Altman’s Nashville. If these never got made as movies but got pitched and sold as TV series, how could they be extended past the movie’s plot? And how would they work as TV series?
Season One for each would more or less conform to the movie’s plot, but events would transpire at a much slower pace. The China Syndrome, for example, would open by establishing Jane Fonda’s character as an ambitious young soft-news broadcaster who, with her cameraman (Michael Douglas), one day covers a nuclear plant, where something screwy and disturbing happens at the end of episode one. A later episode would be all about Jack Lemmon’s character deciding to give some revealing documents to the TV news team and would climax with the guy receiving them noticing in his rear-view mirror an ominous car following him closely. The next episode (episode nine, say) would consist entirely of the car chasing him and ultimately running him off the road, intercut with Fonda and Douglas anxiously awaiting his arrival. In other words, the pace is decidedly slower but the plot is similar. Season One ends with Lemmon’s character getting killed, and Season Two follows the movie’s plot but extends the storyline. The nuclear power company, for example, is pretty screwed at the end of the movie—their main plant has destroyed itself, and is pretty well useless. The newer power plant, naturally, is shut down before it opens, so there’s all sorts of surreptitious scrambling by the nuclear executives to get it re-opened, all events that Fonda and Douglas furiously cover. The series turns into an ongoing adventure of the two now-independent journalists forming a company that covers all sorts of corruption, and all the complications (including a flirtation, and eventually a relationship, between Fonda and Douglas.)
Nashville also has its season one end with the shooting of a main character, in this case Ronee Blakley’s, but its cliffhanger concerns whether she lives or dies. What becomes of the folk trio having a love affair in its midst? Why did the assassin target Ronee Blakley? Who does Shelley Duvall’s character sleep with next? Does Barbara Harris become a star on the basis of her finale scene-stealing powerhouse song at the Parthenon? Does Gwen Welles’ character finally understand that she lacks the talent to make it as a performer, or does she continue to pursue that hopeless career? Does Hal Phillip Walker win the presidency?
See where I’m going with this? Some movies have built-in plot extensions that could go on for years, while others come to a dead stop with the end of the movie. Which TV series do you think could be built from a well-known movie plot?