"I don't think I understand you."
"What did you use as source material?"
"Oh. Well, the book, of course. It had been submitted to the studio in galleys, and a producer there liked it — Jules Fairchild — and asked me to take a look at it, and I thought it was something I'd like to do. I think I saw the magazine serialization, too, which was pretty close to the book, McCall's published it, I think, or Redbook, I'm not sure which, a two-part serial."
"The book was your basic source, would you say?"
"Yes. Although I did do additional research on my own. A book, you understand — even a fine book like The Paper Dragon, for which I have only the greatest respect — it's still only a book, you see, and there's a great deal involved in turning it into a motion picture… well, I don't know if I should go into all of this."
"Please do," McIntyre said.
"I was introduced to Mr. Driscoll for the first time this morning," Ralph said, "but I suppose he must have been a little puzzled by the changes made in bringing his book to the screen — so perhaps this will be instructive to him as well." Ralph turned and smiled at Driscoll, who was watching and listening attentively from the jury box. "There are some people who feel that the novel and the motion picture are similar in technique and in scope, but I disagree with them. They argue that a novelist can immediately turn from a minute examination of a woman's mouth, let us say, to a battlefield with hundreds of men in an infantry charge, that sort of thing — in other words, from a closeup to a full shot, and all without any transition, in much the same way that a camera would handle it. But we must remember that the novelist is dealing with the written word, and he must describe that woman's mouth in words, he must describe that infantry charge in words, which means that those words must first be registered on the reader's eye, and then carried to the reader's brain where, depending on how good or bad the writer is, there will be an intellectual response that will hopefully trigger an emotional response.
"Well, we have a situation completely diametrical to this in the motion picture, because we go directly for the emotional response; there is no need for a middleman, there is no need for a brain that will translate words into images that may or may not stimulate the tears or laughter we are going for. We start with the images, you see. That is our job, putting images on the screen in sequence, arranging and editing and putting in order these images that are designed to evoke a direct emotional response. I can tell you that if I come at that screen with a blood-stained knife, you are going to rear back in fright and I don't need any words to accompany it, that knife is its own motivation and its own explanation. Or if I fill that screen with a beautiful woman's face, and I show her eyes lidded and her lips parting, I don't have to accompany it with any interior monologues, I don't need poetry to describe her, we know she wants to be kissed, and we want to kiss her because the appeal is direct and emotional, the response is immediate.
"So, in beginning my work on a screenplay, I look upon the novel or the stage play or whatever it is I'm translating only as an outline of something that will become larger and grander than the printed word allowed. Even an excellent book like The Paper Dragon, for which I have nothing but the deepest veneration, becomes a detailed study for what will be my film. I sift through it and sort through it, trying to cut through the maze of words, trying to get through to the emotion hidden there, distilling what the author meant, translating his words directly into images so that the audience reaction will be immediate and overwhelming. In short, I eliminate the intellectual response in favor of the emotional. Then, if we're lucky, when these images have registered, when they have evoked the proper emotional response, why then the audience, if we are lucky, will experience an intellectual response as well. That's the difference between a novel and a motion picture, and it is this very difference that makes the film a much more difficult form in which to work and, in my estimation, a much higher art form."
"I see," Genitori said.
"Yes," Ralph said, and glanced toward the jury box to smile at Driscoll.
"You said you did some additional research…"
"Yes."
"… before you began work on your screenplay?"
"Yes."
"Can you tell us what this research was?"
"Yes, certainly. As I indicated earlier, I spent a great deal of time in the Pacific during and after World War II, and I think it was the setting of Mr. Driscoll's fine novel that first attracted me to it — the possibility of shooting in Korea, a beautiful country, we got some really excellent footage of the countryside, you know. But in addition to that, I was interested in the book as a study of war, as an extension really of my own attempts to understand war in my early radio plays and also in one or two other films I had made before The Paper Dragon. War and its impact on man, what it does to men, what it causes them to become, this was what interested me. I discovered that a lot of material had been written on the subject, not only fiction, and not only the elongated minute-by-minute battle breakdowns, but serious studies that appeared in a great many of the magazines — Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times Magazine — learned and informative articles about the behavior of our soldiers during the Korean conflict, the Korean war, I should say.
"These articles, and books as well, were written by military analysts, and psychiatrists, and historians, all of whom were probing the behavior of our men during that small war — I thought at one point of changing the title of the picture to The Small War, by the way, which I thought would be more emotionally effective than The Paper Dragon, but the studio objected because they didn't like the use of the word 'small' in any title. Where was I?"
"Books and magazine articles…"
"Yes, about the behavior of our men in Korea, the betrayal of comrades, the informing, the brainwashing, all of it. I studied these books and articles very carefully, using Mr. Driscoll's novel, of course, as my primary source because it was an excellent book and, let's face it, the only one we owned the rights to. We didn't own any of these other books or articles I studied for background material, you see, and besides Mr. Driscoll's novel was very exciting in itself and a firm basis upon which to build a movie. But before I began translating it into images, I also went to several Army bases to get a feeling of what the situation was like today as opposed to what I experienced during World War II. I visited Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Fort Dix in New Jersey, and also the infantry school at Fort Benning. That was the extent of the research I did before I began writing my screenplay."
"Would it then be fair to say that a screenwriter must perforce make certain changes in translating a novel into a film?"
"Absolutely."
"I ask this because I would like to explore some of the specific changes you made, Mr. Knowles, and perhaps find an explanation for them. For example, in Mr. Driscoll's novel, the character named Private Colman does not wear eyeglasses. Yet when you brought this character to the screen, you chose to show him wearing eyeglasses. Now why did you do that?"
"For the actor," Ralph said.
"What do you mean?"
"Not entirely, but at least that was a major consideration. The actor who portrayed Private Colman was a man named Olin Quincy, and he wears eyeglasses. I mean, off the screen, as a part of his normal life. There was a part of the screenplay that called for him to read from a map, and he asked me if it would be all right for him to wear his glasses throughout, so that he could actually do the reading as called for. I said it would be all right. So that was one consideration. But also, if you remember, there's another soldier in the book who wears eyeglasses — Ken-worthy, the fellow who swears a lot — and in one scene there's a mortar attack and his glasses are lifted from his face by the concussion. It seemed to me that if he were the only one in the movie wearing eyeglasses, it would look like a put-up job, as if we had him wearing glasses only so they could be later knocked off, do you understand? So to take the curse off this, I decided to put glasses on another soldier as well, and the logical choice was Private Colman."