Customer Reviews

How to Adapt Anything into a Screenplay

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

After writing one screenplay and one teleplay, I still didn't "get it." I'd read a half dozen books on scriptwriting but was still a bit muddled. The light bulb finally went off with this book. Krevolin starts with short but useful information on structure. This includes a nice breakout of 'where your script should be' by certain pages. He explains it so that you don't just get the formula: you understand the dramatic and narrative reasons for the page delineations.

And he includes the Scene-O-Gram (borrowed from fellow instructor Hal Ackerman). This is a marvelous visual tool. It shows your script from back story to climax as clearly as possible. Combined with his explanation of page 'marks', I finally realized how a script should truly flow together.

Then he takes several films, including The Patriot, X-Men and The Shawshank Redemption, and looks at key elements while placing them into the Scene-O-Gram format. This is not simply formulaic plug and place. It is a look at key components and structure for adapting an existing piece of writing.

Krevolin's book will help you select the most important elements to keep from the work you're adapting, and how to put them together. A must-have if you plan on adapting something into a screenplay.

I am an aspiring screenwriter just looking into the field. I have have not yet taken any courses but would love to learn about screenwriting. This book is the perfect for that. It is fascinating reading about the basic structure of a screenplay in terms that even I can understand. The analysis of Hollywood movie screenplays is a great way to teach the process through example. Reading a few of the negative reviews made me wonder if those people understood the purpose of this wonderful book. It was not written with the idea that is was to help Steven Speilberg with his work. It was written for you and me. Based on that it has to be a 5 star book. Simply fascinating.

What I love about this book is that it gives a system to develop a story
that can be used for screenplays or even stageplays and books. It uses lots of great examples and is fun and easy to read. Enjoy it, I did.

A book claiming to tell you how to adapt "anything" into a screenplay should have a bit more than books, short stories and plays. I mean, books and short stories are basically the same kind of thing! While it does have an example of comic book adaptation (X-Men), it doesn't have anything about adapting a serial or TV-show. Since this is a fairly common form of adaptation (e.g. The Flintstones, SWAT, Firefly) I am somewhat disappointed. Some of the legal advice was useful but also incomplete.

i really didn't find this very helpful. i think it's sort of a neat idea to try and have a book about adapting "anything" but in the end it didn't help me. i'm adapting a book to the screen, one of the most common adaptations, and this book provided very little insight. it just restated what i already know. as most so-called "how-to" screenwriting books do, this follows in the tradition of giving new names to common sense terms that you already know as a writer.

As a new screenwriter trying to soak up all the information I can about writing, I bought this book and was disappointed. I started to raise my eyebrow a bit in the beginning of it and so I went the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) to see what screenplays the author had written so that I could assure myself that this guy actually knew what he was talking about, but he had no writing credits at all! Not even "Glitter" or "Gigli" - even as bad as those are, at least that would mean that he has actually written a script that got picked up which would then give him the right to teach me a few lessons. I re-read the back of the book and it says that he is a professor of screenwriting. It was at that point that I put this book down for good and reminded myself of a famous quote, "Those who can't do, teach."

The author has many accomplishments under his belt in the industry and the book may prove useful to those whose goal is to write a screenplay acceptable to that industry that churns out mostly mediocre fare. To anyone who has even a glimmer of artistic pretension, it will prove dissapointing. Two lines jumped out at me. "Some people feel that because there is an accepted way of doing something, they need to do things differently. This is not a sign of genius, but merely a sign of a severe problem with authority'

And my thoughts turn to Griffith,Wells,and Shakespere,Ibsen, and Sravinsky,Messian and,Parker,Coltrane,and Hendrix,Dylan, and Darwin,Freud,and, VanGough,Picasso Surly all displayed signs of problems with authority.

Richard Krevolin has concisely put into print a set of principles that deserves a place on your bookshelf next to Hauge and McKee, and, if followed will guide you to tell your story in the most effective and screenworthy manner. This book will fuel your passion as well as provide the guiding principles you can use to adapt pre-existing works or your own original stories.
Richard Bagdazian
President, San Diego Screenwriters' Association

this guy and his book are a joke. adapt anything into a screenplay? come on! like it's that easy. this guy's a hack. has he ever even written a screenplay? i doubt it. this book is a load of donkey poo. take a class or just write. learn to write well. don't follow trends or listen to idiots like this. if you really want to read this still, go to a bookstore and read it, DO NOT BUY. it's a rip off.

This is a just a bad book. Plain and simple. Just bad. I sold it to a used book store a week after a bought it.