Odd Adaptations

Spurred by the news of Warner Bros. and Will and Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick’s decision to turn Justin Halpern’s Twitter account, ShitMyDadSays, into a sitcom, I want to talk about odd adaptations. After all, recent months have also seen the announcement of Universal and Hasbro teaming up for a Monopoloy movie, directed by Ridley Scott no less. And I’m continually amused when I sign academic book contracts and the terms include movie and television rights … or at least I was until Michael Himmel, author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, told me that he sold the rights (mainly, for the name) for a handsome sum, and now I’m thinking that my next book should be called Around the World with 80 Blades: The Tale of a Ninja Pirate Assassin. More after fold…

Jokes aside, such adaptations pose interesting questions of how much needs to be there in order to warrant or justify an adaptation. As some critics of the ShitMyDadSays would-be sitcom note (see link above), why does Warner Bros. need to pay someone for the idea of a grumpy old man, especially when surely the final product won’t carry the name “Shit My Dad Says” if it’s intended for network television, nor will it be as profane? Halpern’s book deal, I can see, since books can be big lists, and it can carry that title, but WB seems to be paying in the hopes that a bunch of Twidiots will think they’re getting something even remotely like Halpern’s disjointed series of quotations.

As for Monopoly, I imagined a film like Wall Street that was about avarice, greed, and families falling apart, as a way of capturing the spirit of the game. But it seems they’re going the Jumanji route, of having a guy wake up in Monopoly City. Cute gimmick, but then where do you go? Jumanji allowed all sorts of CGI animal attacks, but after the sight gags of seeing a big shoe, Uncle Pennybags’s outrageous moustache, and the hero winning second prize in a beauty contest, what is there left to do? Show lots of pictures of realty? It risks being a movie adaptation more of HGTV than of Monopoly. The title is there to grab attention, but arguably little more, since there isn’t enough of an entity that one could point to and say is suitably Monopoly-ish, I’d argue.

By contrast, look at Spike Jonze’s recent Where the Wild Things Are. It’s a short book, and one that Jonze had to go far beyond, but he captured the other-worldliness of the book’s imaginary world, as well as its me-centredness. He captured 9 year-old boy anger. Visually, he captured the characters. And he dug deep into the story to try and excavate ideas of where these characters come from, each an embodiment of someone in Max’s life. I love the film (and think it’s especially rich for younger siblings). But he was aided in having, from the original: (i) a visual style, (ii) a rough sketch of a world and its motivating logic, (iii) specific characters with some rudimentary motivations, and (iv) a beginning, a vague middle, and an end. ShitMyDadSays has (iii), whereas Monopoly sort of has (ii). I don’t think they’re enough.

Another contrast may come from Disney’s theme park ride film, Pirates of the Caribbean, which again had (i) through (iv) – we expected a dark world that’s still Disney at the end of the day, we knew the kind of characters to expect, we had a sense of the periodization and visuals of the film, and we knew there’d be a pursuit of treasure with ne’er-do-well pirates blocking the path but losing, complete with allusions to myths and legends of the seven seas. And most of all, we expected a ride, something that we’d sit and ooh and aah at. I don’t think it’s great movie-making, but it delivered a reasonable enough adaptation, and it certainly did well.

Indeed, beyond (i) through (iv), we should also note how adaptations either extend or play with the mode of engaging with the original. Pirates of the Caribbean is a ride, just as is its predecessor. Where the Wild Things Are is an extravagant tale told to us in the otherworldly setting of the movie cinema, thereby neatly approximating the extravagant tale told to us in the otherworldly setting of one’s nightly storytime. By contrast, ShitMyDadSays is engaged with in quick bursts amidst a stream of updates from others, small disparate jokes. Monopoly is a game, actively participated in, usually somewhat contentiously so, over the course of a lazy afternoon or evening. Both adaptations, in other words, will call for a big shift in how their audience interacts with them.

This isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself. Videogames regularly shift how we interact with a storyworld (though, perhaps tellingly, they have a long history of being panned), many sketch shows have turned into entire films (though some of the better examples, such as Borat, had stronger narrative arcs built into or suggested by the original already). But when a shift occurs, or when something is filled in, it needs to fulfill an audience’s desire to see more along those lines – we need to want to walk through Springfield to find the Simpsons Hit and Run game amusing, or we need to care enough about Wayne and Garth to see more of their world in Wayne’s World. So the question, to which we’ll see answers to in due course (presuming both ShitMyDadSays and the Monopoly movie see the light of day), is whether people want a greater interaction with Halpern’s dad or with the Monopoly top hat.