WHAT IS PAGE & SCREEN? Probably the first cultural genre that made any kind of impact on me when I was in my teens was that of mainstream Hollywood films, specifically those of the 1970s. As it happens, many of the ones that interested me were adapted from novels - and not novels that necessarily aspired to be Great Literature. At the same time, these are not novels that we can unthinkingly consign to the scrap heap of literary history, to the trash bin. Most of them have serious themes and serious intent, though, admittedly, a few are merely entertainments and were probably meant to function as such. The fact that they were picked up by Hollywood can speak of many things. They may have been huge bestsellers in literary form, or their plots and story lines may have been such that they were judged to contain big commercial possibilities for the film form. The authors or agents of the novels may have been connected in, or actually worked in, Hollywood itself, or perhaps a big time, A list actor or producer showed interest in bringing the novel to the screen; whatever. The possibility to exist in two such disparate mediums is a huge responsibility to hand over to a story. Notice I speak of "the story" or, if you prefer, The Story, as though it were a Platonic Form. In the Page & Screen essays I propose to exercise the outrageous option of treating it as exactly that. I'm not really all that interested in the question of whether or not this is metaphysically feasible or ontologically sound, and will just proceed as if it were the case, as if the story existed in an ideal abstract state and the various novelists and filmmakers have been given the task of shaping it into story form, of doing the best they can with it. Of course, quite frequently stories and their details often undergo huge changes in the course of transition from one medium to the other. "The book was better than the movie" (or vice versa) is something that we hear all the time. This indicates to me that, indeed, at least psychologically if no other way, there is indeed some kind of abstract notion of "the story"; it is as if we are talking about a piece of music, played in one case by a lone player with an acoustic guitar and played in another case by a symphony orchestra. The piece of music exists separately and apart from either interpretation of it. I'm aware, too, that it may be objected that The Story is something that was wholly created by the original novelist and is not something that could have been accessed by the filmmaker had this not initially been the case. I have no good answer for this per se so, while acknowledging it, I just ignore it or pretend it isn't so. My main purpose is to investigate some of the works which first introduced me to human aspiration in the arts at a time when I had little or no ability to truly understand that aspiration, or even the most basic circumstances of the adult world; and so, while I fully recognize the philosophical problems that may arise along the way, I don't pretend to be able to solve them. Back to Peter