Year: 2006
Type: dissertation
Abstract: “Corporate Fictions: Film Adaptation and Authorship in the Classical Hollywood \nEra” examines the adaptation of literary fiction by select United States motion picture \nstudios—in reality filmmaking corporations, and analyzed as such in this study—in the \n1930s and 1940s. Based largely on research culled from archival resources, each chapter \nof “Corporate Fictions” analyzes individual instances of and long-term strategies toward \nfilm adaptation within several firms through recourse to company memoranda, budgets, \nmarketing campaigns, the literary and cinematic texts themselves and other \ncontemporaneous materials. \nAnalysis of these materials reveals that film adaptation is part of a larger cultural \nadaptation that takes place when a studio acquires, produces, and releases a literary \nproperty—in this process, characters, stories, and even literary authors are dramatically \ntransformed as they are re-projected through such domains as product tie-ins, print, film \nand radio advertisements, newspaper serializations, movie editions and novelizations, and \nthe primary literary and cinematic texts themselves. \nEach of the case studies that comprise this dissertation seeks to explain why and how \na particular filmmaking corporation would choose to acquire, adapt, and produce a work \nof literature at a particular moment in its history. In the process, “Corporate Fictions” \nchallenges traditional assumptions that have guided investigations in this field by \ndemonstrating the complexity of film adaptation, a process subject to myriad influences \nand pragmatic choices, as well as the sophistication by which the companies under \nscrutiny developed distinctive conventions that guided their approaches to literary \nacquisition, story development, production, marketing, and exhibition.
Author: Kyle Dawson Edwards
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1717849025