Adapting novel into a screenplay

If you wish to hire a professional (WGA member) to write a screenplay for a high-budget feature film, that will cost a minimum of $65,802. Low budget will run you $31,974.

However, if you wish to hire an amateur, they will cost whatever you can negotiate.

William Goldman covers this in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. It's a small part of a larger book so, no, you don't have to read the whole thing, just the parts that pertain. Where they are in the book, I don't remember, but I do remember this: Turning novels into screenplays is most often a question of what do I leave out? Here's why: You can't get it all in there. You can only capture the spirit of the work (and a few details, even if, yes, you must leave out some of the most remarkable ones). So you end up having to compress things. You compress time. You compress scope. You compress events. You compress multiple characters into some that never existed in the novel but make telling the story easier, more manageable. You compress in ways that keep the story true to the source because 120 pages of script will never contain what 700 pages of novel contained. (Or, in the case of The Godfather, which sits at my elbow, 162 pages of script versus 448 book pages, at least in a Putnam hardcover edition.)

There are other books covering the same process. Seems like J. Michael Straczynski has covered it in one of his.

But before you decide to pay someone to write the script, why not give that a go yourself? Buying a how-to book would be cheaper than hiring someone. And cheaper still would be checking a book out of your local library.

While you're at it, don't forget to do this, too: for an entertaining bit of research, pick a novel that's been turned into a movie and compare the two. Take note of what's been changed, and consider why those changes were made. Good luck, and have fun with it.

Interesting topic. It sounds too difficult to accomplish. But $65,000, $31,000. Ridiculous! I'd rather buy a house with $65,000...well, the down-payment.

Hi lovenest3,

Mel Brooks had problems with something he'd written.

There were too many scenes to make it work in Broadway, there was too much dialogue for it to work as a novel. So he turned it into a screenplay.

And thank the Lord he did. Otherwise we wouldn't have got The Producers.

Summonere gives good advice. Get Adventures in the Screen Trade. The follow-up's pretty good too. William Goldman's the man who only had Kathy Bates break James Caan's legs, instead of chopping the feet off, in Misery. And he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

So save yourself 65k, learn how to format a screenplay... and do it yourself!

This is too early to pay someone $30000. You'd have no guarantees you'd see a penny of that back when you don't have a buyer lined up. By the way, if you say you can hardly string a novel together, you are either too hard on yourself, or not ready to sell it.

I would not let a single agent decide on the course the book takes. Get some beta readers and have some critical editors tear apart your story and polish it up until it shines. Then send it out again and again and again. Only when multiple agents give the same sort of response, should you start considering to listen to it.

Book to Script

If you REALLY want to get someone to write a screenplay for you your best bet is to get your book published and get a producer to option the film rights and get them to pay someone to develop and write a script.

Word of caution re simply hiring a WGA-er and paying top rates: just because someone's WGA does NOT mean they are going to write you a good script, so you're better off doing it yourself or for no money. It is bonkers, unless you're really rich, to pay someone thousands to write something for you that may not actually be very good.

Someone I've worked on a movie with (who is very rich) paid a well-known feature writer USD75,000 to re-write/polish a screenplay in 3 weeks and the client was extremely unhappy with the slapdash and unuseable resulting 'work' that he had to shell out USD75,000 for. Perhaps this is an unfair example, but that's what happens in real life.

I'm not sure I get why you'd want to adapt your own book at this point. Studios and producers buy unpublished manuscripts all the time. When I worked at New Line, there was a time when they were all whipped up to buy unpublished manuscripts. I sat in the meeting wishing like hell I had one handy. Studios and producers like to buy them because not only can they make money off of the movie, but they can make money off of publishing the book.

Now, should one be lucky enough to have this happen, it's quite common for the writer of the book to get the first shot at the screenplay. You have to negotiate for it, but it's a fairly easy one to get. If you don't write it, the studio will foot the bill to have the script written. If you had someone else write it, maybe they'd use/buy it, maybe not. Either way, why worry about it?

Why not just market your manuscript to producers and studios?

Best of luck to ya'!

I am adapting one of my unpublished novels to a movie script. For now, I'm only interested in knowing whether or not I can.

I'm fascinated by the process, pleased with my progress, and I look forward to seeing the finished product.


Sharon

So long as you understand how books become movies:

1. Book becomes a huge popular hit with a built-in audience, or— if the budget is low enough— a producer loves it.

2. A production company buys the film rights from the novelist.

3. A professional screenwriter with a great track record is hired to adapt the novel.

4. The novelist gets invited to the premiere if it's in their contract.

That's it 99.95% of the time.

As long as you already have an agent, might as well publish the novel and then see if any interest develops. You can always try a screenplay later.

kullervo said:

So long as you understand how books become movies:

4. The novelist gets invited to the premiere if it's in their contract.

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And he has to buy his own ticket. (Nodding once more, and loosely at that, toward William Goldman.)

Verbal said:

I'm not sure I get why you'd want to adapt your own book at this point. Studios and producers buy unpublished manuscripts all the time. When I worked at New Line, there was a time when they were all whipped up to buy unpublished manuscripts. I sat in the meeting wishing like hell I had one handy. Studios and producers like to buy them because not only can they make money off of the movie, but they can make money off of publishing the book.

Now, should one be lucky enough to have this happen, it's quite common for the writer of the book to get the first shot at the screenplay. You have to negotiate for it, but it's a fairly easy one to get. If you don't write it, the studio will foot the bill to have the script written. If you had someone else write it, maybe they'd use/buy it, maybe not. Either way, why worry about it?

Why not just market your manuscript to producers and studios?

Best of luck to ya'!

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I currently have a novel being considered at a major publisher. How likely is it that they are also considering it for film potential? Would that have a bearing on whether the publisher buys the manuscript?

52greg said:

I currently have a novel being considered at a major publisher. How likely is it that they are also considering it for film potential? Would that have a bearing on whether the publisher buys the manuscript?

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Only indirectly, since those rights -- the film adaptation rights, would normally remains yours, not belong to the publishers (unless they are particularly greedy and you exceptionally naive when the time comes to sign the contract).

Generally a publisher buys "first publication rights" for a particular region -- North America, or something like that, for a given number of years, in hardcover or softcover, or what have you.

But the underlying copyright for a novel remains with the author. You. In essence you can sell or lease particular specific rights to your work, but whatever is not expressly sold or leased remains with you.

That's why, for instance, even though The Shining was produced as a feature film, it was subsequently produced as a TV mini-series. That was because Stephen King sold the feature film rights "only" -- but not the television adaptation rights. And later, when he wasn't all that happy with the movie, he was perfectly free to go ahead and sell those rights to somebody else to have a mini-series made from the same underlying work.

As to whether the possibility of a movie being made from the work might influence the publishers, above and beyond the question of their being able to make money off the sale -- sure, in some sense. But only in the general sense that a story that would likely make a good movie does so by appealing to a very broad audience and who wouldn't want a book to also appeal to a broad audience?

NMS

nmstevens said:

Only indirectly, since those rights -- the film adaptation rights, would normally remains yours, not belong to the publishers (unless they are particularly greedy and you exceptionally naive when the time comes to sign the contract).

Generally a publisher buys "first publication rights" for a particular region -- North America, or something like that, for a given number of years, in hardcover or softcover, or what have you.

But the underlying copyright for a novel remains with the author. You. In essence you can sell or lease particular specific rights to your work, but whatever is not expressly sold or leased remains with you.

That's why, for instance, even though The Shining was produced as a feature film, it was subsequently produced as a TV mini-series. That was because Stephen King sold the feature film rights "only" -- but not the television adaptation rights. And later, when he wasn't all that happy with the movie, he was perfectly free to go ahead and sell those rights to somebody else to have a mini-series made from the same underlying work.

As to whether the possibility of a movie being made from the work might influence the publishers, above and beyond the question of their being able to make money off the sale -- sure, in some sense. But only in the general sense that a story that would likely make a good movie does so by appealing to a very broad audience and who wouldn't want a book to also appeal to a broad audience?

NMS

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Well, I have an email buddy who owns a small film production company. She read a synopsis of this novel and told me if I could sell the novel to a publisher that somebody would buy the film rights.

52greg said:

Well, I have an email buddy who owns a small film production company. She read a synopsis of this novel and told me if I could sell the novel to a publisher that somebody would buy the film rights.

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It's possible that somebody might. Not having read the synopsis, it's hard to say. Much more likely that the rights would be optioned by somebody rather than bought (an option is a limited "right to buy" the rights for a certain amount of time -- a year or a couple years, during which the optioner has a chance to see if he can get the movie set up. If he can, he then goes ahead and exercises the option. If not, he let's the option lapse, the rights revert to you, and he's only spent the amount of the option rather than ending up permanently saddled with the rights to a work that he can't do anything with.

But you should understand that unless you're talking about a best-selling novel, that the adaptation rights aren't enormous. For a small or mid-list novel from an unknown writer, you'd only be talking about four or low five figures tops. And that's to acquire the rights altogether -- not to option them.

Now, if the movie got made and made money, you would see additional money -- but easily nine times out of ten, the movie never gets made.

So if it gets published, that's one thing. If someone is interested in acquiring the rights, they might option it, that's a different thing. They may or may not buy it, that's yet again a different thing. If they buy it, the movie may or may not be made.

You need to understand that those are all separate and distinct steps along the way.

My wife is a producer. She's looked at a great many mid-list novels as possible source material. Most of them *haven't* been bought or optioned. A few of them she was sufficiently interested in to make an offer to the authors for very low-money options (because she doesn't have any kind of studio deal). And of those deals she's made, none of them have ultimately turned into either a sale or a movie. Some have expired. Some she's still working on.

That's how it works and you shouldn't expect anything else.

NMS

And whatever happens, don't expect much money. An option might get you dinner, a sale might get you a car.

Not a nice car.