ALL OF US STRANGERS, ZONE OF INTEREST, BARBIE, and the art of adaptation
Why are people acting like adaptations are somehow 'lesser than'?
2023 was a great year for movies.
It was also a terrible year for The Movies.
There is little question that we are seeing a turbulent moment for the theatrical distribution and exhibition of motion pictures, both at the studio level and for indies. It is terrifying out there right now, and there are no easy answers, no instant fixes. I am not smart enough to solve anything or fix anything, so instead, I would rather focus on the films that meant something to me, the performances I will carry with me, and the moments that defined the year in movies for me. The rest of it either will or won’t sort itself out, but as long as movies are being made and there are films worth celebrating, I’ll do my very best to keep talking about them and to keep spotlighting the things I love.
There’s no real mystery about my favorite things this year. I’ve already mentioned my year-end Letterboxd list to you last week, so if you were curious, you’ve already looked at it. But there’s a difference between just posting a list and explaining your feelings, so I thought I’d go through and discuss a few of them today.
First, though, I’d like to address a very odd controversy that played out over the weekend…
MORE THAN A CLEAR BOX
I’m not sure why people are so upset at the idea that Barbie was an adapted screenplay.
First and foremost, there is a giant credit that plays during the opening sequence of the film. “Based on BARBIE by Mattel.” That should pretty much settle the question, but over the weekend, Judd Apatow and many others seemed genuinely hot at the idea that Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay is not eligible for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards this year, and I’m not sure why. If it’s because the Best Original Screenplay category is potentially overcrowded this year, that’s probably a valid concern. It’s been a great year for movies, and many of them were based on source material from different places. But if it’s because the idea of an adapted film somehow being lesser than an original film, I’d like to interrogate that.
Adaptation is incredibly difficult. There is no such thing as a simple adaptation. Even things that seem like they’re automatically suited to the big screen routinely fail, even with deeply talented people attached in key positions. When you put the right creative team together with the right piece of material, the results can be transcendent. Peter Jackson put together one of the most incredible teams of creative collaborators, all of them hungry to accomplish the same goal, and the result was The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He also put many of the same people together and the result was The Hobbit trilogy, so it’s clear there is no magic formula that guarantees success every time.
Over the years, Mattel has created dozens of animated Barbie films and specials, but it wasn’t until 2009 that they decided to create a live-action movie, signing a deal with Universal Pictures. A fat lot of nothing happened, and the next time there were headlines about the film was in 2014 when Sony started to develop a Barbie movie with Jenny Bicks as the writer. Bicks was a Sex and the City alumni, and I recently read her version of the film just to see what the take was. Her script was the version that Diablo Cody rewrote, the same version that Amy Schumer was attached to in 2016 before she basically threw it all out and started over. That script was about a young woman working in city government, trying to find her place in a male-dominated environment, who learns important lessons about confidence and herself from her new temp assistant, who turns out to be a magical incarnation of the actual Barbie. It does not work. It is easy to see why it was developed and developed and redeveloped and developed some more. It’s a movie largely set in the real world where Barbie plays a role akin to Samantha from Bewitched or Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie. She’s this magical figure who wreaks some comic havoc on the main character’s life, but ultimately, she’s there to help.
One of the things that became obvious reading the Bicks script and a later Diablo Cody rewrite is that they were drawing on very similar ideas about who Barbie is, who Ken is, what their relationship is, what their world is like, and who their supporting cast is. While I understand the argument that Barbie is not conventional source material by any means, I’m afraid I disagree completely with the idea that Baumbach and Gerwig started with “a clear box”. When Maggie first reads the resume that her temp hands her, she lists off some of her previous jobs. “Astronaut… dancer… princess… fashion designer… and race car driver. Okay, then. Very impressive.” When we see all those Barbies in Gerwig’s film working all of those jobs, it’s a different joke, sure, but it draws on the same idea. At a certain point, Barbie invites Maggie to bring a date out to her place in Malibu, which turns out to be a very familiar Beach House, complete with Skipper, Midge, the very odd Alan, and, of course, Ken. He’s Barbie’s boyfriend, although most days, he just feels like an accessory. I think one of the most amazing images in Gerwig’s film is the introduction of Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie, and the knowing laughs she generates are a testament to just how deeply-seeded pop culture’s relationship with Barbie is.
Look, Gerwig and Baumbach took all of this stuff and did their own thing with it. No doubt about it. There is nothing from any of the Sony drafts that ended up anywhere near their film. I doubt they ever read any of these scripts. But I’m sure when they got the job, they were handed a binder of material that outlined everything Mattel has ever put out that had the name Barbie on it. That’s how it worked when I was hired back in 2000 to write a Mortal Kombat movie. There was no story at all. My partner Rebecca Swan and I had to build that from scratch. But there was a ton of material for us to either use or discard, however we saw fit. Sure, Mortal Kombat had more conventional story material, but Barbie is a property that had enough meat on the proverbial bone for writers like Olivia Milch to take their shot at figuring out how to tell a story using this iconic figure. Sony finally let go of the rights to the project in 2018, at which point LuckyChap, Margot Robbie’s company, finally came aboard as co-producers. They worked on the film for a full year before they signed Gerwig and Baumbach to write, with Gerwig attached to direct as well, and at that point, we all know what happened. They wrote something that not only plays with the characters from Barbie’s extended family and their cultural iconography but also looks at the way American women have had a relationship with Barbie for over 50 years now. It’s a very smart, very funny film, and I think Gerwig and Baumbach deserve an Oscar nomination (as much as anyone ever does) for crafting something that took these very familiar puzzle pieces and put together something that resonated deeply with many people while feeling like something new.
But just looking at the development history of the project, how can anyone seriously call this an original screenplay? How can something that took so many false starts and wrong turns with so many other creative teams be called an original screenplay? We live in the age of IP as King, and there has never been a more limber definition of what exactly qualifies as IP. When I tried to discuss this on Twitter (never a great idea), people kept insisting that biopics render my entire argument moot, but I think that’s a different type of adaptation. For one thing, Barbie’s not real, so it’s weird to try to apply biopic rules to a film about her. She’s a creation owned by a corporation that has been telling stories about this character for a long time now. In terms of biopics or true stories, the rule has always been that if the screenwriter is doing their research and building something out of that research, then that is an original screenplay. If they’re using a specific book or article as their inspiration, that’s an adaptation.
In a larger sense, though, none of this matters. They wrote a very original take on someone else’s material, and the only reason any of this conversation is occurring is because of awards season. There’s nothing insulting about calling their work adapted. If anything, I would think Gerwig and Baumbach were working at a very high level of difficulty, something all the failed versions of the script only make more apparent. If you’re trying to make the case that this is the “best” adaptation, maybe you can lean on the idea that it’s certainly the most adapted of the eligible films.
Stanley Kubrick made adaptations almost exclusively. Even 2001, his most original film, and arguably one of the most original films ever made, was based on a short story. I think Kubrick is one of the most original filmmakers ever, a man whose voice is crystal clear in each and every one of his movies, even though all of them are based on material created by other people. His career should be the ultimate refutation of the idea that there is anything “lesser than” about adaptation. Whatever you call what Gerwig and Baumbach did, the end result is a film that only Gerwig would have made, a film that is absolutely hers, and one that she deserves that DGA nomination for this morning.
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