Short Story Rarely Fills the Screen

Even as it earns critical praise and awards, the recently released “In the Bedroom” isn’t likely to jump-start interest in what, for Hollywood, remains dubious source material: the contemporary American short story.

“In the Bedroom” is based on the short story “Killings,” by Andre Dubus, from the collection “Finding a Girl in America,” published in 1980. The film, in fact, is dedicated to Dubus, who died in 1999 at age 62. Dubus wrote several novellas but only one novel, 1967’s “The Lieutenant,” and spent much of his career exploring the trials of everyday people, many of them New Englanders, as a short-story writer.

In Hollywood, then, Dubus’ work tended to go unnoticed and came to first-time writer-director Todd Field’s attention only when it was recommended by a friend. The unwritten axiom of the movie industry holds that novels, with their broad range of character and action, make ready fodder for movies, while short stories remain esoteric gambles. Too thin on plot, stories that might offer poetic insights into the interior life of a character are considered mere whiffs of feature films.

Indeed, screen adaptations of popular contemporary novels keep popping up: The film version of “The Shipping News,” by E. Annie Proulx, opened Christmas Day; “The Hours,” by Michael Cunningham, and “White Oleander,” by Janet Fitch, are due out next year; and work has begun on adapting Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” for the screen. Short-story adaptations, meanwhile, remain the exception, a shorter list with some distinguished examples: “The Shawshank Redemption,” adapted from a short story by Stephen King; “The Killers,” the 1946 film noir based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway; “2001: A Space Odyssey,” taken from a story by Arthur C. Clarke; “The Dead,” based on the story by James Joyce and director John Huston’s last film; and “My Son the Fanatic,” a highly regarded 1999 art-house film from a New Yorker story by Hanif Kureishi.

Given the short story’s ability to combine resonant themes and compact storytelling, the form would seem to be ripe for adaptation. But many in the film industry say the short story’s very economy makes executives nervous about its ability to translate to the screen; those that do, like “In the Bedroom,” are seen as “small movies” that get made for a variety of underdog reasons and can perhaps become fluke hits.

“When push comes to shove, short stories tend to be incomplete in terms of movie language,” says Richard Green, an agent at United Talent Agency who represents the film rights for the work of novelist Jonathan Franzen (“The Corrections”), journalist Sebastian Junger (“The Perfect Storm”) and novelist and short-story writer Ethan Canin (“The Palace Thief”), among others. “I don’t know at what point Hollywood decided movie scripts had to be told in three acts, but short stories tend to be Act 1 or Act 2 or Act 3.”

Producer Scott Rudin, for instance, optioned a short story, “The Smoker,” by David Schickler, out of a recent New Yorker fiction issue, “not because I intended to fill out the events, but because the short story seemed like the first act of a movie.”

“The Smoker” is a seriocomic tale of a high school teacher at an all-girls prep school who unwittingly becomes part of an arranged marriage with a student. “It’s going to get expanded, beyond the point where the story ends,” says Rudin.

As a producer, Rudin has a history of buying up hot novel properties--he has the rights to Franzen’s “The Corrections” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” by Michael Chabon, having produced the film of “Wonder Boys,” a previous Chabon novel.

Those books, to say nothing of the more commercial, best-selling ones by the likes of King or John Grisham, build brand identity in the publishing marketplace, a track record that helps justify bringing them to the screen.

“The reason short stories aren’t adapted into movies is because short stories don’t mean anything to executives with green-light power,” says Richard Walter, a UCLA film professor and author of several books, including the novel “Escape From Film School.” “There’s no money going after a fine story by Richard Ford.”

As director Field will tell you, there’s not much money going after a story by Dubus, either. “In the Bedroom,” made for less than what it costs to produce some hours of dramatic television, is a painful look at the violence that tears at the marital life of a couple, Matt and Ruth Fowler (such is the bracing, straightforward nature of Dubus’ prose that it is impossible to reveal the first line of “Killings” without giving away the plot of “In the Bedroom”).

Already, “In the Bedroom” is racking up awards for co-stars Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, as well as for the film, named best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics and best first film by the National Board of Review. The film first gained acclaim at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was bought by Miramax.

For Field, an actor best-known for his role as the jazz piano-playing friend of Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” the release of “In the Bedroom” culminated a relationship with Dubus’ writing that began in 1992, when Field was studying directing at the American Film Institute.

At the time, he hadn’t heard of Dubus. Though the author’s final collection of stories, “Dancing After Hours” (1996), was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Dubus--whose son, Andre Dubus III, has achieved acclaim with his novel “House of Sand and Fog”--worked in a discipline that assured some measure of obscurity.

Not that Dubus’ life was without its own drama. In 1986, after stopping along a Massachusetts highway to help a stranded motorist, Dubus was struck by another vehicle, an incident that left him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Among his subsequent works was “Broken Vessels,” a collection of autobiographical essays.

The same year Dubus released “Dancing After Hours,” Field was on the set of “Eyes Wide Shut” in England. “Somebody asked me, ‘You’re going to make a film, right? What are you going to do?’” He was going to adapt this Andre Dubus story, “Killings,” Field heard himself say. The story, all of 18 pages, is something of a revenge tale, but it was dense with rich emotional material, Field felt.

Back in the States, Field tracked down the rights to the story and discovered they were held by Graham Leader, who had a script, by Robert Festinger, but had been unable to get the film made. Field met with Festinger, who says he had already done numerous drafts of the screenplay himself. After discussions, Field re-adapted the story, but in a way that emphasized the relationship between Matt and Ruth, something that didn’t exist in the foreground of the short story or in Festinger’s drafts.

“He captured the emotions of this marriage and of the relationships, and he didn’t have to fill in all the back story,” says Suzanne Dubus, the author’s daughter.

Field changed other details, too, including the story’s locale, north of Boston, where Dubus lived. Field chose a territory he knew better: small-town Maine, where he and his family live part of the year.

Authors can be prickly on this issue--the late Ken Kesey said he refused to see the screen adaptation of his book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and John Irving, displeased with a film based on his novel “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” had the film’s title character changed to Simon Birch.

According to Joel Gotler of Artist Management Group, who represents the Dubus estate for the film rights to the author’s work, “In the Bedroom” has not sent producers scurrying to find more Dubus stories to adapt.

“It’s a really sexy thing to option a novel,” says Field. “And a lot of short stories probably are optioned and never get made. People option collections.... Maybe you don’t hear about it because, when you hear about novels being optioned, it’s an Irving thing or a Grisham thing or a King thing--these are all brand-name authors.”

As UTA’s Green sees it, Hollywood is less unwilling than unable to weigh a short story’s screen potential, unless a writer comes in with a clear idea of how to expand the material. Even Field says of short stories: “They’re either too interior or they’ve got this button thing [at the end] that comes off like a ‘Twilight Zone.’”

There is a “Twilight Zone”-sounding tinge to “Impostor,” to be released in January and based on a short story by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” became the source material for “Blade Runner.”

The edict about short stories, then, may differ depending on the genre, making sci-fi tales more commercially viable than contemporary dramatic realism or classics like “The Dead.” Then, too, adaptations of collections are sometimes tried--Robert Altman’s 1993 film “Short Cuts,” for instance, based on nine stories and a prose poem by the late Raymond Carver. In February, IFC Films will release “Big Bad Love,” directed by Arliss Howard and based on several stories by Mississippi writer Larry Brown.

“The easiest way to sell a collection is to have them thematically linked,” says Amy Williams, a literary agent at International Creative Management in New York who represents a number of short-story writers. “But the film rights are tougher to control, because if the link is thematic, the stories don’t stand on their own so much.”

“In the Bedroom” stands on its own and in tandem with “Killings.” For the film doesn’t begin when the short story ends; rather, it digs deep into what’s already there, slowing down the action and returning to explore the relationships embedded in Dubus’ prose.

Says Field, who came to know Dubus and got his blessing on the screenplay: “There was a tremendous bar to strive for, but it gave me a tremendous amount of courage.”