The Hunger Games — Movies for Lawyers — The Act Of Communication Point Of View

From Katherine:

The Hunger Games is a phenomenon, there is no doubt about that! In our town, you can only imagine how excited everyone got over a record-breaking 155 million dollar opening weekend. Why am I so excited about it? Because of all the adaptations-to-the-screen that I have asked attorneys to go see, this is one I know you will feel compelled to attend. Maybe you loved the books, maybe you love amazing filmmaking, maybe you are a lawyer who is always smart enough to check out what is important in American pop culture, or maybe you are simply thrilled that anti-violent me is actually recommending something that comes from Lionsgate, who brought you Saw.

If I could encourage every lawyer who tries to go to see every adaptation – whether good or bad – I would. Why? Because this is what you do with your life’s work. You take a huge, gigantic, overflowing real life story filled with evidence and characters and plot points and time lines and you adapt it into your trial story. What do you leave out? What do you keep in? What do you build? What do you diminish? I have written about this aspect of how the worlds of the adaptive filmmaker and the trial lawyer meet more than a few times in this blog and elsewhere.

So…

I’d like you to be inspired by the words of one of my favorite young playwrights, Tiffany Antone. I first met Tiffany through Theatricum Botanicum’s Seedlings program. I have acted in her shows, directed her shows, and written shows that I’ve allowed her to produce. She’s literally decades younger than I am – and a theatre artist of the first caliber. What I call “the real deal.” I was so swept up with how her response to The Hunger Games in her blog awdsandends applied to the work of attorneys that I wanted to share some of her words with you. If you want to read the rest of her piece, please do so at her wonderful blog.

HUNGRY by Tiffany Antone

Adaptations are tricky things… depending on the source material, you’ve either got too much to grapple with, or (if it’s a short story) too much room to go hog wild in. And while it can be reassuring to have the story skeleton already there for you to drape your words upon, there also stands the possibility that you’ll find yourself screaming: “Oh GOD! This is a best selling book with a global fan base… how am I going to live up to that?!”

And so you dive in…

And if it’s done really, really well – when you’re finished – you get The Hunger Games.

Now, obviously when you start out with 400 pages of text, not everything is going to make it onto the Big Screen – you’ve got interior monologues that have to be translated into action (if it merits inclusion) and you’ve got to show character traits/transitions/emotional progression through visual elements rather than some handy expositional thought. Sometimes you’ve got to cut characters, because although extraneous body-jumping is manageable in a book, it’s a bit schizophrenic for a mere 2 hour movie – you’ve got a lot of material to cover, and you’ve got to make the character choices that will best serve the story, not necessarily the audience’s expectations.
So, you boil it down – What happened/is happening/is about to happen? Who are the key people in this story? What are the main points of action that help our protagonist get from beginning to end?

TIP: What trial story are you carving out in your adaptation today?

Movies For Lawyers