ABSTRACT
When reading the work of political economists of film, I am often reminded of the climactic scene in that celebrated literary adaptation The Wizard of Oz (1939), in which plucky Toto pulls aside a curtain to reveal that the vast, glowering image of the Wizard and his booming voice are all so many smoke-and-mirror technical effects being produced by a cowering, utterly nondescript old man. The beguiling images, stirring narratives and glamorous personae of the Hollywood film are, political economists seem bent on reiterating, all reducible to an insatiable industry machine focussed on accumulating profit above all else. The reason such critics have, on occasion, lapsed into a shrill register is no doubt due to frustration at the overwhelmingly textual focus of most screen studies. This dominant analytic paradigm perhaps unconsciously perpetuates a strongly Romanticised mode of analysis which Bourdieu summarised as ‘the representation of culture as a kind of superior reality, irreducible to the vulgar demands of economics, and the ideology of free, disinterested “creation” founded on the spontaneity of innate inspiration’ (1993: 114). My aim with this book has been to steer an analytical course between these two extremes. Contemporary literary adaptations are products of an intricate, hugely complex institutional and industrial system. Importantly, however, the adaptation industry not only stymies the appearance of certain kinds of adaptations (as dour political economists tend to emphasise in keeping with their left-wing, economically deterministic mode); it also facilitates the appearance of others – including in the niche category of the arthouse literary adaptation with which this study has been principally concerned. The adaptation industry as a whole is both enabling as well as obstructive. Thus to appreciate adaptation as an industrial, economic and above all sociological process is not necessarily disillusioning – delegitimising our enjoyment of adaptations – but, rather, enlightening. The model elaborated in this study aims to highlight the processes facilitating the creation of certain kinds of adaptations (focussing, for argumentative clarity, specifically though not exclusively on adaptations between the book and screen sectors). Secondly, the focus has been on industrial structures shifting in response to new patterns of audience enthusiasm (in imitation of other agents’ successes for example) and for newly prominent media (such as comics). Like all ecosystems, the adaptation industry functions according to complex patterns of feedback and responsiveness, with changes in the role and status of specific agents affecting the structure of the field as a whole. Finally, pervasive throughout the present volume is the idea that detailed modelling of the adaptation industry allows us to see how the various contemporary media sectors are increasingly tightly converged into a single adaptation-industry network through conglomerate ownership structures, digital technologies and the ubiquity of the content rights economy.
