Adapting toys to film no easy task
When Japanese toy company Takara was ready to introduce the Transformers in 1984, the figures were just pieces of colorful plastic. There’s no drama inherent in a car that turns into a robot — spectacle, maybe, but not conflict or character, the elements of plot.
Every movie needs a plot, a story to motivate characters to go do something. “Transformers: The Last Knight,” the fifth in the live-action franchise, opens on Wednesday, June 21; and with more than 30 years, there’s now an established universe, characters with identifiable traits and histories (Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson and John Turturro each return to the series for the new film) and even ongoing narratives (the evolution of hero robot Optimus Prime and the growth and status elevation of sidekick Bumblebee).
Not every screenplay writer is so lucky, though. Hollywood has a habit of trying to adapt pre-existing properties with no inherent story, like amusement park rides, board games and other toy lines. And for writers who land such an assignment, the job combines the difficulty of writing any cohesive tale while making sure that the original property is being represented in a way that makes the creators happy.
In some cases, a screenwriter has to start from scratch, with little more than a list of character names or other such incidentals. Movies like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series and “Battleship” are created with obstacles, like details or settings that must be included, but without the advantage of knowing where the story will start or stop.
“Clue has no characters; it has six colors,” says Jonathan Lynn, the screenwriter, director and novelist (his latest, “Samaritans,” came out in April) who took on the task of bringing the board game to the screen in the 1980s. “No characters, no story. It was six colors, nine rooms and six weapons.”
Lynn had previously written a short story-toscreen adaptation, helping turn “The Internecine Project” into a film with James Coburn and Lee Grant. But working with a board game, where he was taking a predetermined setting and having to retrofit a story to it, was a special sort of challenge.
“Apparently, it was important that all nine rooms on the board were featured, and all the weapons, and the secret passages,” Lynn says. “And so with this straitjacket, I tried to construct a story.”
That story, a murder mystery anchored by the almost master-of-ceremonies-like presence of the butler, came from not the “what” of the Clue characters, but the “why.”
“I started by trying to think, ‘How come all of these characters have these names of these colors? That’s too absurd,’ Lynn says. “So then I realized that they must be aliases, given to them by their host. And that was a very useful starting point.”
While Lynn was given little beyond the names of colors and weapons up front, Carroll Cartwright and Topper Lilien were stuck at the other end of the spectrum, having been given an overwhelming amount of detail. When the writers took on the challenge of translating the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons into a film, there were scores of different worlds, different character archetypes, and quests with which to play.
“I remember at one point Carroll was saying that it was as if you land-
ed on Earth and someone gave you an Encyclopedia Britannica and said, ‘find the story,’ ” Lilien says.
But with so many options came so many different people to please. The goal was to write a film that would make both the hard-core Dungeons & Dragons gamer happy while also reaching out to those who, like the writers, had never played the game before. And with this being the first time that the property would make it to the screen, the number of stakeholders who wanted a say ballooned.
“In order for it to represent this enormously successful game, it had to appease everyone on so many different levels that it ended up getting generic,” Cartwright says. “It was trying to please too many people.”
That process meant that Cartwright and Lilien had to pitch a tremendous number of new ideas for the film’s plot, with the hope of not only stumbling upon a movie, but, Lilien says, a new adventure to be translated into its own game.
“We just kept cranking out stories. Sometimes we’d come back after a weekend with five or six potential story ideas and they’d all get rejected,” Cartwright says, “or we’d play with one for a week or two and then they would decide it wasn’t representative.”
Though they were in different situations, Lynn and Cartwright agree on one idea.
“I wouldn’t adapt a board game again,” Lynn says. “I would happily adapt a book or a short story. … The problem with a game is that there’s no plot. No character, no plot. And those are the two essentials. So what you’ve got is a lot of other details, but nothing that’s central to the work. You’ve been given the window dressing, but not the fundamentals.”
“It was one of those very difficult projects where we met so many interesting, intelligent, odd people that it was fun on some level,” says Cartwright. “But it was kind of a fun nightmare.”