U N I T 2 THE SEVENTH ART In this Unit you will improve your communication skills in the field of media by exploring some aspects of the film industry and also learn some technical vocabulary. You will also go through the remarkable connection between literature, history, cinema and how the three of them are interlinked with one another. A. ADAPTING HISTORY AND Many thousands of movies are adaptations from historical or literary sources. History is generically dealt with by cinema in the epic, period or historical film. Film historians generally distinguish the epic group from the strict historical group by its size, expense and the magnificence of the movie s costumes and sets. A period film is distinguished by the fact that the setting can be placed in the far distant past or the immediate present. Although literature, history and movies are distinct forms of communication, thousands of solutions and adaptations have been found so that they can get along and have fruitful relationships. The first key is the nature and tradition of adaptation itself. Tales evolve and each generation adjusts the A scene from To Have and Have Not. 242 LITERATURE INTO FILMS stories of the past to the present time and to its modern needs and ways of storytelling. How a story is told is as important as its subject matter. For example, there have been numerous versions of The Great Gatsby written by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. The most famous one is the 1974 adaptation directed by Jack Clayton. The script was written by Francis Ford Coppola. Fitzgerald knew Hollywood and even if working as a screenwriter was a negative experience, it gave him material for his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, filmed by Elia Kazan in 1976. The career of its hero, Monroe Stahr, is based on that of the celebrated Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg. The most recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby is a 2013 Australian-American 3D drama film co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann which stars Leonardo Di Caprio. Apart from Fitzgerald, two other famous writers had a difficult relationship with Hollywood: William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Faulkner collaborated with Howard Hawks (film director, producer and screenwriter) on two genuine Hollywood classics : The Big Sleep (taken from a Raymond Chandler novel, 1939) and To Have and Have Not (Ernest Hemingway, 1937) in the 1940s. According to Adrian Wootton writer, broadcaster, programmer and chief executive of Film London Hemingway did not want to write for Hollywood but he loved interfering from behind the scenes and telling the directors and producers who they couldn t cast and which scriptwriters to use.