True Event Adaptation

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Scripting Real Lives in the Past

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Introduction: Scripting Real Lives

      • Davinia Thornley

      Pages 3-10

   3. The Study of Historical Films as Adaptation: Some Critical Reflections

      • Patrick Cattrysse

      Pages 11-31

   4. Waiting for the Great Swell of ‘74: John Milius and Autobiographical Self-Projection in Big Wednesday

      • Alfio Leotta

      Pages 33-46

   5. Making Robert Sarkies’ Film Out of the Blue: Adaptation and Indigenization in Aotearoa New Zealand

      • Davinia Thornley

      Pages 47-64

3. Scripting Real Lives in the Present

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 65-65

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   2. When the Truth Becomes Too Hard to Tell: Jocelyne Saab & Dunia (2005)

      • Margaret McVeigh

      Pages 67-86

   3. Making It “Real”/“Reel”: Truth, Trauma, and American Exceptionalism in Zero Dark Thirty

      • Jennifer L. Gauthier

      Pages 87-109

   4. (The Facts Before) The Fiction Before the Facts: Suburra from Novel (to Trial) to Feature to TV Serial

      • Paolo Russo

      Pages 111-141

   5. Reaching Young Audiences Through Research: Using the NABC Method to Create the Norwegian Web Teenage Drama SKAM/Shame

      • Eva Novrup Redvall

      Pages 143-161

4. Scripting Real Lives for the Future

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 163-163

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   2. An Adaptation of Life: Ethnographically Grounded Fiction as a Method of Inquiry into Personal Accounts of Traumatic Events

      • Ester T. Roura

      Pages 165-185

   3. Writing the Screenplay for the History Film: A Case Study Featuring the Historical Figure, C. Y. O’Connor

      • Nadia Meneghello

      Pages 187-205

5. Back Matter

   Pages 207-237

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These essays all—in various ways—address the relationship between adaptation, “true events,” and cultural memory. They ask (and frequently answer) the question: how do we script stories about real events that are often still fresh in our memories and may involve living people? True Event Adaptation: Scripting Real Lives contains essays from scholars committed to interrogating historical and current hard-hitting events, traumas, and truths through various media. Each essay goes beyond general discussion of adaptation and media to engage with the specifics of adapting true life events—addressing pertinent and controversial questions around scriptwriting, representation, ethics, memory, forms of history, and methodological interventions. Written for readers interested in how memory works on culture as well as screenwriting choices, the collection offers new perspectives on historical media and commercial media that is currently being produced, as well as on media created by the book’s contributors themselves.

• memory
• screenwriting
• media
• representation
• true stories
• real life events
• visual culture
• cultural memory

“Why should fictional adaptations get all the headlines? Davinia Thornley’s contributors revisit a set of ten real-life subjects and situations, from female circumcision in Egypt to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, examining their adaptation in films from The Quiet American to Zero Dark Thirty. These essays complicate and challenge traditional binaries between genre and realism, creating and interpreting, fictional and nonfictional films. Individually and collectively, they make a persuasive case for the importance of adaptation, and the power of adaptation studies, in helping us make sense of contemporary reality.” (Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware, USA)

• Department of Media, Film and Communication, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

  Davinia Thornley

Davinia Thornley is Senior Lecturer in Media, Film, and Communication at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is the author of the monograph, Cinema, Cross-Cultural Collaboration, and Criticism: Filming on an Uneven Field (2014). 

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