Modernizing Old Tales

In a way, this is a companion piece to the ‘in name only’ post from last week. ‘In name only’ adaptations are one way to modernize a tale - or, at least, they can be. Yet, if you wish to modernize an old tale - be it a fairy tale or a story that is already in public domain -, there’s one big thing to keep in mind. Stick to its core.

 

It’s not that much of a problem to put an old tale into a more modern setting. Stories are usually very versatile when it comes to the setting and it’s a rare case in which the story will only work in a certain time and place. What needs to be preserved is not so much the setting, but the core of the story - the main plot, if you will. The relationships between the main characters, the main struggle, the main problem of the story.

 

You can set “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Snow White” in the modern world. You can put “Robin Hood” and “King Arthur” into the corporate world where it’s no longer about kings and local rulers, but about CEOs and managers and their troubles. The core of the story is not compromised in such cases. The first thing you have to do, though, is to explore the core.

 

Let me use Dracula again - let’s have a short look at the novel, the ‘in name only’ Hammer movies, the Francis Ford Coppola version, and the Steven Moffat series.

The novel is, of course, the original version of the tale. This is what we have to work with. Dracula is written in epistolary style, meaning it reads like a collection of diary entries, letters, newspaper articles, etc. Like this, it is more ‘real’ and looks like someone put together what all the parties included found out - yet, one might wonder how they all managed to even keep all the conversations in mind to put them down verbatim. The story in Dracula is a slow burn and the title character, the count himself, is absent for most of the book. He features strongly in the beginning, but only has a few strong scenes in the latter parts. In case of Dracula, this works very well, because it keeps him distant and makes sure he’s the threat in the shadows who might jump out at the heroes at any time. The focus of the novel lies on the characters - the future hunters and the future victim Lucy (who writes her own diary entries).

The Hammer series pushes most of the characters introduced in the book aside - Jonathan Harker arrives at the count’s castle to kill a vampire (and fails), the Mina/Lucy hybrid is the sister of another main character based on Arthur Holmwood, but van Helsing is there, now Jonathan’s superior who sent him to the castle in the first place. And that’s just the first movie. Unlike in the novel, where Mina takes an important role in the hunt, the Mina/Lucy hybrid is there to be the threatened girl who gets killed, giving her brother some strong motivation (and man-pain). The showdown in the end is between van Helsing (who gives the impression of being more experienced with vampires here) and Dracula himself. So … how was this done right? It was done right by keeping the threat level of Dracula high. He’s dangerous, sending out his minions and acting himself, giving the impressions of being ahead of the hunters until the very end. In the fight between him and van Helsing, he also seems to be winning for quite a while. Therefore, his destruction (in gory Hammer glory) is a satisfactory reward. That actually works with most of the other Dracula movies which feature Christopher Lee in the title role. He manages to make Dracula threatening and thus challenges the heroes of the movie in question. Even though the movies have little to do with the book, they can hold their own and still are Dracula movies.

Francis Ford Coppola claimed to make a ‘book true’ version of Dracula, even going far enough as to call it “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” right on the posters, but that is not the case. He connected Dracula to Vlad Tepes, a real-life Romanian ruler, going so far as to include the suicide of this man’s wife as a major plot point to create a love story where none was meant to be. For this, at least, he has kept all characters by name, yet most of them, such as Dr. Seward, van Helsing, Lucy, and, worst of all, Mina are very much not like their book counterparts. While the major scenes are still there, even those we rarely see in other movie versions (and this is one of very few which include Quincey Morris), the movie takes a serious turn for the worse with the added romance. In the book, there is no question that Mina and Jonathan are in love and ready to fight and die for each other. This coupled with Mina’s strength in the book (within the constraints of Victorian womanhood, Mina is an over-powered badass) makes it absolutely impossible that she’d start an affair with Dracula while her fiancé is missing. Here, the book was added to and the addition fell flat, because it didn’t take the original characters into account.

Now for the Moffat version. Coppola already made the mistake of making the count more human and putting him into a more central position, creating that love triangle between him, Jonathan (the ‘this man is mine’ line is in the movie), and Mina. Moffat went a good deal further by making Dracula the ‘hero’ of his series and focusing completely on him. Not only does that mean that most other characters are ill done-to, it also means that he’s trying and failing to give the original monster depth it was never meant to have. Dracula was conceived as a personification of ‘outside evil’ - a horror principle where the main character or characters are drawn into a confrontation with something evil without having done anything to provoke that (while ‘inside evil’ stems from actions of the main characters, as seen in “Frankenstein” or “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”). Turning him into the main character demands depth he doesn’t possess and which can’t be read out of the book, because it was never intended. Dracula doesn’t need motivation, wants and needs and fears, and other means of defining him. He’s there to threaten the main characters and force them to act and grow. Moffat’s version doesn’t do that, of course - only Dracula gets his moment of growth when realizing that sunlight can’t hurt him (which, in the novel, it never could - Dracula is seen outside during the day, sunlight only diminishes his powers).

 

What does that mean? Well, Hammer studios and their authors understood the core of Dracula - the outside evil which was represented by the count. This principle isn’t bound to one time, either, the last two movies of the series are set in the then modern world. Putting Dracula in the 21st century wouldn’t be much of a problem. Details will change, but the general threat Dracula presents stays the same. Coppola, for some reason, felt the need to add a romance where none was supposed to be, making Dracula more human. Even though the movie as a such is fun to watch, this development didn’t help any of the characters involved. Neither did the connection to Vlad Tepes help in any way - while Stoker might have heard the name ‘Dracula’ in connection to the Romanian ruler (whose father was a member of the order of the dragon, so Vlad Tepes was the son of the dragon - Dracula), he never researched this character and certainly didn’t model his vampire on him. He just liked the name. Moffat wanted to make Dracula a hero who is a monster at the same time and failed because there wasn’t enough depth to make Dracula more than the monster. All the gore and blood was in vain and couldn’t save the story he told. On the other hand, the anime and manga “Hellsing” did well with turning Dracula into even more of a threat by making him something akin to an eldritch horror.

 

The core of Dracula is the threat he presents, the way his very existence threatens the people who meet up with him. The core of Robin Hood is the man who fights for the poor by robbing the rich. The core of King Arthur is the uniting force which, in the end, fails to unite for good. As long as a story about Dracula, Robin Hood, or King Arthur keeps that core, you can change the setting as you wish without destroying anything. Lose the core and you end up with something which doesn’t even deserve being called ‘in name only.’

In Name Only

‘In Name Only’ means nothing more or less than using a brand or franchise name people connect to a certain story or type of story, but without really using the content of the intellectual property. Whenever a movie or novel is ‘in name only,’ it is using a well-known name, but presenting something different.

 

The most well-known company to use ‘in name only’ material for their movies was, of course, Hammer Studios. The British horror film studio used big names like ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein,’ but never kept to the stories which are connected to the names. Often, they would redefine the characters, leave some out, add others, and twist and turn everything to suit their needs. Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” is a love letter to Hammer films, both in its ‘in name only’ use of Washington Irving’s story of the headless horseman and in its colour pallet and liberal use of gore. Two more recent and much less pleasant examples would be Disney's “Artemis Fowl” movie which barely keeps anything from the books and twists the few bits it keeps around to be almost unrecognizable and the BBC’s “Dracula” mini-series by Steven Moffat which should not even have borne the title ‘Dracula’ (it makes Hammer’s Dracula movies look like a true-to-the-book version).

 

First and foremost, ‘in name only’ isn’t necessarily bad. Hammer made good horror movies while only using the lightest touches of the original material. The stories are well-written and well-paced, the actors are superb, the special effects are excellent for the time, and every one of the movies (except, perhaps, for the very last) is an enjoyable ride, even today. Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow” is just as entertaining and much better than the original story would be when stretched to the length of a full-blown movie (the short story simply doesn’t have enough content to stretch it to 90 or more minutes). In both cases, ‘in name only’ doesn’t hurt the enjoyment of the stories and it doesn’t matter much that there’s not much of the original story left.

In the two more recent examples mentioned above, however, the ‘in name only’ treatment gives the impression of coming from the creators not realizing what was at the heart of the property. “Sleepy Hollow” is there to scare people and leaves the reader with a slight uncertainty as to Ichabod Crane’s fate (was he killed? was it the real horseman or Brom Bones?). Even though the uncertainty doesn’t happen in the movie, it still scares and gives us enough of a thrill to enjoy it. ‘What happened to Ichabod?’ is replaced with ‘what is the deal with the horseman?’ Hammer’s Dracula series still focuses very well on Dracula and the ‘outside evil’ he represents, so the names of those he destroys and threatens don’t matter that much (and this aspect is where the last Dracula movie with Christopher Lee fails). The duality of Lee’s Dracula and Cushing’s van Helsing (in most movies) is what people enjoy and what works so well for the movies. They’re old-fashioned ‘good will triumph, but evil will never be fully conquered’ movies and all the better  for it.

 

Compared to Moffat’s version of “Dracula”, the problem becomes obvious early on. Hammer has always been a studio for gore and sex, so the gory parts of the new series aren’t the main problem here. Today, a lot more is possible than at that time and that’s okay. One big problem is that Moffat wants for Dracula to be the hero of the tale and, honestly, Dracula doesn’t have the necessary depth for that. He’s the outside evil which forces a group of Victorians to face the horrid truth that there are monsters in the age of science and technology and turns them into vampire hunters. He doesn’t really work as a hero, only as the outside source of evil the heroes have to fight.

The gratuitous gore and blood and body horror don’t help the series here. In the Hammer movies, the gore and blood are there, but they’re used at appropriate times - when vampires (Dracula or his victims) die. Seeing Dracula crumble to dust (until the next time…) is cathartic, it’s the end we’ve been waiting for (especially a few movies in when expectations have been built up). Seeing Dracula split a wolf to emerge a human before killing a convent full of nuns is … violence for violence’s sake. It serves no deeper purpose.

Slotting a ‘whodunit’ mystery into a horror story doesn’t do either part a favour, either. Making Dracula trade quips and one-liners with a vampire-hunting nun whom he kills only to meet her descendant (huh?) later isn’t making him threatening, it’s just turning him into an undead version of Moffat’s Sherlock (and, to a smaller degree, Moffat’s Doctor Who).

The whole time skip from part two to part three makes little sense and does the story even less favours. Yes, Dracula could have lived unnoticed and unchallenged for a hundred years, but in different circumstances, not locked in a coffin and underwater.

 

Yet, “Dracula” has had a lot of different versions already, one more isn’t hurting the intellectual property. Things look much worse for “Artemis Fowl”. Why Disney thought that a story about a preteen criminal mastermind successfully taking a big ransom of gold from the fairies was for them, I can’t say. That, however, is the core of the first Artemis Fowl novel - a highly successful book from a highly successful series which has by now spawned a recent spin-off in “The Fowl Twins”. The series works its way through a long development of Artemis’ character from full-blown villain to full-blown hero throughout eight books.

Even the very first trailer clearly showed that Disney, the writers, and the director had no idea what they were doing there. They changed an awful lot of things - destroying the whole story in the process and ending up with a generic ‘nice boy hero gets supernatural help’ movie. That is, very much, the polar opposite of the original. A lot of changes in an ‘in name only’ adaption could be forgiven - even taking Holly’s big arc about being the first female officer in LEP Recon -, but the movie doesn’t even recognize any basics. It’s like Hammer had made a Dracula movie about taking over Wall Street (and that at least makes sense for the ‘man of power’ character of Hammer’s Dracula). The only basics left are a boy called Artemis Fowl with a bodyguard called Butler (but not to his face) who encounters fairies. The ransom story is out of the window, the Fowl family suddenly knows about fairies already, Artemis’ father is alive (he’s officially dead in the first book) and his mother is dead (she is alive throughout the series, later on giving birth to his younger brothers, the aforementioned “Fowl Twins”), and Opal Koboi, Artemis’ nemesis if he has one, is simply wasted on the story. The movie might be entertaining, but calling it “Artemis Fowl” is simply not suitable. This is a generic fantasy story for kids and should have gotten a different title.

 

‘In Name Only’ can work under the right circumstances and in the right hands. The first thing you need to make sure of, though, is that you do not remove the core of a story. You can change a lot of the things in the story as long as you keep to what makes the story tick. Hammer Studios did that, Tim Burton did that, Steven Moffat and Disney did not.

Different Detectives and How to Use Them

There are three different types of detectives around and there’s a place and time for each of them. So let’s have a look at their advantages and disadvantages and where to best put them. Note, however, that this is no strict rule. You can use them for other kinds of mystery stories as well, the ones I list here are merely those they’re the best fit for.

 

Let’s begin with the professional detective. Professional detectives are found within the police and they are working for the authorities. They work best in police procedurals and thrillers. The professional detective can, of course, also be a thief taker, the queen’s inquisitor, the captain of the guards, the ship’s security officer, or the head of security of a big conglomerate of companies in a future where companies have taken over the world.

The professional detective knows perfectly well how to handle a case. They are well-versed in the procedures necessary to solve a crime and put the culprit in court. In addition, they have the authorities at their back, making it much harder for a suspect and the culprit to refuse cooperation. With that in mind, it is easy to see why they are best-suited for procedurals, where police procedure plays an important role, or thrillers, where the high stakes require help from the authorities.

Yet, the same things which can work as advantages, can also put the professional detective at a disadvantage. Having to keep to procedures means that they can’t follow every lead as they wish to, but have to keep to rules which might allow for the savvy criminal to remove evidence before they can collect it. Having the authorities at their back can also mean being pulled off a case or warned off a suspect who has influence with those higher up the ladder.

 

Next, we have the semi-professional detective. This is the group of people whose job is connected to crime and investigation to a degree. Private investigators, lawyers, and journalists fall into that category, similar professions in other times can also work here. The noir genre is highly reliant on this type of semi-professional and they do well with any kind of story where knowledge of investigation is necessary, yet it’s not a case in which procedure plays a large role. For closed-circle mysteries, where a group is locked away without a way in or out, semi-professionals who just ‘happen’ to be there make a good detective.

Semi-professional detectives are usually experienced with investigation. They often have a wide net of acquaintances and informants and can dip into less legal sources than the professional. Quite some PIs are former police officers with knowledge about procedures, lawyers in such a story usually are specialized on criminal law, and journalists in those cases often are court reporters. With the ability to dip into illegal sources, the semi-professional is ideal for noir stories, where it is less about the legal punishment of the culprit and more about clearing the innocent and finding the culprit in the first place. In the closed-circle mysteries, there’s rarely a chance for a professional detective to be at hand (as nobody would start such a murder spree with a professional present), so anyone with a sound training in investigation might make for a good detective in this case.

Again, what is an advantage in one situation, can also be a disadvantage for the semi-professional detective in another. Not being police, the semi-professional can’t put as much pressure on suspects as a professional can. Information unearthed through illegal channels can’t be used in court and thus can’t help with convicting the culprit. The authorities can also intervene with the their work a lot. Often, it’s a police officer who wants them out of the way or hates them for past encounters.

 

Finally, the amateur detective. Here, we have an amateur without prior training in investigation who comes in to solve a crime. These detectives are usually found in cosy mysteries and can also be found in closed-circle mysteries.

Unlike the professional detective, the amateur is not bound by any procedures and doesn’t have to adhere to any specific behaviour. They usually are well-settled in the surrounding in which the murder happens, so they have a plethora of friends to work with. Often, they also prove themselves to be very good judges of character, which allows for them to decide that suspect A has no reason to do the crime whereas suspect B is clearly guilty and bring the investigation to the right target. Cosy mysteries rely heavily on this type of investigator because they usually do not investigate high-stake cases which would not be cosy any longer. As mentioned with the closed-circle mysteries above, such cases rarely occur when there’s a professional on the premises and often there is no semi-professional around either and a gifted amateur has to take over until the authorities can come in.

The disadvantages of the amateur detective are pretty easy to see. Neither do they have the endorsement of the authorities (in most cases, professional detectives will sooner or later warn them off the case), nor do they have the necessary training to put together a chain of evidence that will hold up in court. On the other hand, they can freely mingle with people and often draw out information simply because they’re not the police (or the guard or security).

 

When it comes to writing a stand-alone story with a detective, all three types can be equally viable, depending on what kind of story you plan for. If you wish to show the advantages and disadvantages of ‘keeping to the book’ or want high stakes with a lot of victims in your story, the professional is the right type for you. If you want someone who can be trusted to solve a case they’re not personally involved in, but get hired to clear up or want to make public, the semi-professional will be ideal. If you want to give the reader that nice feeling that an everyday person like them can also solve a crime and help a friend or relative (or themselves), then the amateur will play their role perfectly.

When it comes to writing a series, however, I would suggest keeping it to semi-professionals or professionals, if you can. The main problem with having an amateur sleuth, such as Jessica Fletcher, solve case after case is to find a reason why they’re always around when the murder happens and why the professionals always do such a bad job. There’s a reason why the theory came up that Jessica killed all the victims herself to gain enough inspiration for all the books she needs to write to help support her enormous family as she has so many nephews and nieces. A semi-professional will be pulled into new crimes every now and then - a PI might mostly look for cheating spouses and stealing employees, but a murder can happen every now and then; a lawyer might take cases which are hopeless unless they find the real culprit; and a journalist might have a tendency to investigate crimes instead of just writing about them. It goes without saying that a professional detective with the homicide division will have new murders to work on regularly.

 

There you have it, a look at all the different types of detectives you can use for your murder mystery stories. All of them are interesting to write in the right surroundings and right type of story, so you might even want to eventually try them all out.

Why Recasting Indiana Jones Is Difficult

With a fifth Indiana Jones movie being in the works, there are voices to recast the title role, since Harrison Ford is not exactly ‘dynamic hero’ material any longer at his age. Some say that’s not going to work, others point to other franchises (especially James Bond) to prove that it would. Yet, it will be a good deal more difficult to recast Henry Jones than to recast James Bond. Here is why.

 

There are quite some differences between Indiana Jones and James Bond, but two things are especially important for why it is easy to recast James Bond (or Sherlock Holmes or Dracula or a number of other characters) and why it is much harder to recast Indiana Jones.

The first of those differences is ‘prior history.’ James Bond has existed a long time before Sean Connery first asked for his drink ‘shaken, not stirred’ and introduced himself as ‘Bond, James Bond’ to the villain of the piece. Bond was created as a literary character, first appearing in novels and short stories. Indiana Jones, on the other hand, has featured in various media, including novels, comics, and computer games, but he has no ‘prior history’ to “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, the first time Harrison Ford played him.

Why is that important? Because it influences how much we connect a certain face, the face of an actor, with a character. James Bond was more or less faceless until the first movie was made. He was a character on the page and every reader could imagine him the way they wanted - the way they read him, the way they wanted him to be. Bond was a malleable character like everyone who first came to the world as a literary figure (hence I mentioned Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, also two literary characters with a lot of different movie and TV incarnations).

Indiana Jones, on the other hand, only has one face - the face of Harrison Ford. Even in other media, this is how he looks. On the covers of novels, he bears Harrison Ford’s likeness. In computer games, he more or less looks like Ford (depending on how far advanced technology was when the game was made). In comics, he’s displaying Ford’s body language as well as his face. In all of this media, our picture of Indiana Jones is that of Ford in his early forties.

Recasting James Bond means putting another actor in the role of James Bond. Of course, the way Bond is portrayed varies greatly between different incarnations, but the identity of 007 remains the same - it’s only different aspects which might come to the forefront, depending on actor and time. Recasting Indiana Jones will mean selling the audience a new face which they will not associate with the character. This is not just another aspect of a faceless literary figure, this will be a new face for a movie creation, replacing one actor with the next. It’s much harder to make this kind of thing stick for the audience.

 

The second difference is the length of time an actor had been connected to the role in question. James Bond changes his face every few years - which lends credence to the theory that he’s a time lord. We all might associate him most strongly with the first actor we saw in the role, but we are used to seeing a different face introducing himself as ‘Bond, James Bond’ every couple of years. We might approve or disapprove of the new face, but we don’t mind a new incarnation.

Indiana Jones has never really had a different face from Harrison Ford’s. There are a few actors who have played a much younger version of him (as in the prologue of “The Last Crusade”), but that is not a real recasting - of course, Ford can’t put on a boy scout uniform and play his own 15-year-old self (well, he could, but it would be weird).

Ever since 1981, there has only been one fully-grown, adult Indiana Jones and it has been Harrison Ford. During this time span, four actors have played James Bond: Roger Moore (1973-1985), Timothy Dalton (1987-1989), Pierce Brosnan (1995-2002), and Daniel Craig (2006-?).

Had Ford been replaced by a younger actor in movies (not just on TV and as a younger person) during the 90s, it might still have worked. People wouldn’t have liked it (which might be why the second-ever James Bond actor only got one movie), but they would have warmed up to it eventually. He hasn’t been for forty years and now it’s a little late for it.

 

A big problem which comes from not having recast Indiana Jones for a long time can be seen in “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (aka ‘the movie fans pretend doesn’t exist’). Since the actor ages, so does the character. Since the character ages, time has to move on. One big problem with ‘Kingdom’ is that they had to switch out the big baddie. As Ford was already well in his sixties at that time, time had to have moved on to the late 1950s or early 1960s. The Nazis were out, the Soviets had to come in. That is a bigger problem for the story than one might think. The Nazis were obsessed with mysticism, they had a whole department to search for mythical objects - the ‘Ahnenerbe’ division. The Soviets, while sometimes interested in the limits of what human minds or bodies can do, had no time for all that mythical stuff. The Nazis sending someone to look for the crystal skull and use its powers would have worked. With the Soviets, there’s a problem.

James Bond or Sherlock Holmes do not have that problem. They can be moved in time, but there’s no need to do so. Bond always lives in the present, using modern technology (a lot of which was not around when Ian Fleming wrote the stories). He never grows too old to be employed by the MI6 - unless the writers wish for him to. Sherlock Holmes usually stays in Victorian times, unless the writers wish for him to be a more modern character. Since the character is recast whenever it is deemed necessary, that’s not a problem.

James Bond will be a virile man in his late thirties/early forties infinitely, seducing women, fighting enemies, drinking more than perhaps he should, and providing the audience with the wish fulfilment they’re looking for. Indiana Jones is aging with Harrison Ford and is, if we’re honest here, no longer in the shape to do all the derring-do of his younger self.

 

What solution is there? Well, Indiana Jones as a franchise can probably not really be saved, but making another character who is like Indiana Jones, a pulp adventure hero who lives in the 1930s and 1940s and goes on daring adventures, is perfectly possible. There are some, but there’s also no problem in creating new ones. ‘New pulp’ has become a thing, new stories in the same vein, in various times, are being written. Establishing a new hero and, perhaps, establishing the hero as interchangeable, is possible. A recast of Indiana Jones at this time, though, is highly likely - one might say ‘fated’ - to fail.