Big Picture: The Adaptation

As our historic auditorium is closed for major restoration, we’re taking our Big Picture series on the road this summer with Book-to-Screen adaptations at the Starkey Ranch Theatre Library Cultural Center. The movies chosen are different, the circumstances of their exhibition are different, and in many cases the audiences are different. We’re also about to celebrate our 100^th anniversary, and nothing lasts for a century without internalizing the truth: we must adapt, all the time.

Adaptation is hard. Art can resist change as stubbornly as people can. Like a person, any creative work is shaped by its native medium. What’s effective in a novel or a short story might not work in a movie. Imagine adapting a poem to a recipe. Imagine dancing about architecture. Many adaptations fail. Many more are never even attempted. In order to adapt well, it’s crucial not to get bogged down in the specific (often beloved) details of the piece as it was created but to step up and back, and see its aim and nature — its intention.

Each of our selections for this round of Big Picture is a work in adaptation: starting life as a novel or short story, through gentle shaping and sometimes radical transformation, they have found themselves to be successful and interesting films as well. But seen broadly, books and movies can both be seen as simply stories, and each of these films is a story about stories themselves. The Hunger Games is about a societal revolution premised in a story a young woman tells about a friend who inspired her. Stand by Me is about a story four friends have told themselves (and each other) over decades about a trauma they volunteered for but didn’t expect. The Princess Bride is about the invincible power that stories have to transcend time and the world, the way reality can be shaped by unreal expression, the magical way stories have of never really changing. And Little Women is about how life can only be organized as a narrative and understood as a comprehensible story in retrospect.

We adapt to survive. The stories do too. We hope you’ll join us on select Sundays in June and July at Starkey Ranch Theatre Library Cultural Center in exploring the adaptation.

Presented in partnership with Pasco County Library System.