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Public Domain – when it stops being stealing

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In general, I focus on original work; although the biggest payday I’ve ever had as a writer was technically for an adaptation. When I sold Queen Lara I wrote on the title page that it was “freely adapted” from Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the reason I chose that phrasing is because I remembered that it was the same wording applied to the writing credits for the 1995 movie version of The Scarlet Letter which starred Demi Moore and Robert “Yes, I’m wearing a dead deer on my head, why do you ask?” Duvall. It dispensed with a lot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s portrait of a hyopcritical community and filled in the gaps with a lot of battle scenes and Gary Oldman dong. If that’s what “freely adapted” means in Hollywood parlance, it seemed like the most appropriate description for what I had done to Shakespeare.

I do, nevertheless, see the value in creative work eventually being owned, essentially, by the human race, so that it can be taken into the cultural body to be transformed and re-used. Even work that’s not directly adapted serves as inspiration to the imagination – I have a long-in-the-works sci-fi script that is basically a weird story baby that was born in my brain between the Isaac Asimov books I read as a child and the Louis L’Amour books my father read to me.

Adaptation is a vital skill, too, in Hollywood, although a lot of what is being adapated these days is fiercely-guarded intellectual property owned by media giants. And even if it isn’t, market muscle has a way of cordoning off things that aren’t technically-exclusive everywhere. Want to see what I mean? Try making a movie about Cinderella right now while Disney is spending some $150 Million making a movie from it. Sure it’s LEGAL for you to do that and all…but you might find yourself being mysteriously unlucky. You know…UNLUCKY? In the old days they said the beast must be fed. Now they say: the brand must be enhanced.

Which is a long way to saying that I’ve been pursuing an opportunity for a little gig where I could choose something to adapt, provided it met certain parameters with regard to genre and period, and provided it was in the Public Domain. I’m rather excited by the challenge, because finding translation potential in something is, I think, a real skill of its own. Because I’m a strong believer in inherency of medium, a story that makes a great short story is not automatically a great play, or a great movie. And on the other side, great movies have been made from forgettable sources – if you need an example, just look for the clamor out there to mount stage productions of Everybody Comes to Rick’s (the basis for Casablanca). Keep looking. Keep looking.

There’s an Agatha Christie story I’ve been longing to adapt for years; alas, only the earliest works of her career are Public Domain, and the domain line has been frozen for several years by Congressional legislation. But there are many, many other works out there, both amongst the pre-1923 body of, basically, everything, and work published between 1950 and 1963 that did not see its copyright properly renewed before the expiration of its original term.

Project Gutenberg is at the pinnacle of this operation of keeping such work alive and distribute-able by modern technology. And Amazon’s Kindle store is filled with free classics – they take up most of my own Kindle. When I needed to make a narrower search for this particular assignment, though, I found what I sought through the PDF page at SFFaudio. SFFaudio is a website and podcast that focuses on sci-fi, horror, and fantasy in literature, and particularly in audio form. They review audiobooks and audio dramas, and relatively soon they should be reviewing some of my work for Earbud, so I’m looking forward to their response.

Their PDF page includes work that you can find at Gutenberg or on Amazon – there are ample places to read Lovecraft’s works – but their specialty is in scans of the stories as they appeared in pulp magazines.

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Now, this isn’t ever going to substitute for holding the real thing in your hands, but something about the artwork and layout does at least tap at that lovely memory button that prepares you for thrills and wonderment. And by focusing on pulp magazines as sources, you might find indexed here some rare title by a famous author that you might otherwise not have stumbled upon. I know I had never read Asimov’s single-page raspberry to the nuclear age “Silly Asses”, and I have read a LOT of Asimov.

It’s a collection I’ve enjoyed exploring, and (Happy Ending!), I believe I’ve found the piece I want to adapt.

Of COURSE I’m not telling you what it is.


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