Adaptation Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 180198 doi: 10.

1093/adaptation/apq018 Advance Access publication 22 November 2010

Perfect Picture Material: Anthony Adverse and the Future of Adaptation Theory
PATRICK FAUBERT*

Abstract This article explores the current directions of adaptation studies and, in particular, the use of methods that read adaptations as components of cultural discourse. Using Warner Bros. 1936 adaptation of Hervey Allens 1933 novel, Anthony Adverse, as a case study, it confirms the validity of these methods, yet also demonstrates how they risk falling short of their own goals. The Warner Bros. adaptation recreates the novel as a response to Depression-era America, consciously foregoing fidelity in order to engage a contemporaneous sociocultural discourse. However, this discursive project is shaped by factors outside of any studio interest in cultural dialogue. It is, above all, a calculated response to a set of commercial imperatives. The final form of Anthony Adverse was ultimately shaped by a wide range of industrial imperatives present at Warner Bros. and in Hollywood in general, imperatives that deeply shape the cultural response the film offers. As such, a close reading of the adaptation, which accounts for the specific factors of its production, offers a means to rethink the future directions of adaptation studies and both to challenge and to strengthen the methodologies they currently embrace. Keywords Adaptation studies, film studies, cultural studies, adaptation theory, commerce and industry, Hollywood cinema.
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Adaptation studies are undertaking a process of theoretical reorganization. Rejecting the paradigms of fidelity and comparison on which the field was founded, adaptation scholars now approach the practice of adaptation as evidence of the social functions of the cinema. They are, in effect, responding to Dudley Andrews now famous request, made over 20 years ago, for the field to move beyond simple comparative evaluations (see 3537). Over the past few years, our understanding of adaptation has shifted even further, and we now read adaptation as a process of cultural dialogue rather than one of qualitative transcription. Contemporary scholars, such as Linda Hutcheon and Thomas Leitch, argue that the context in which an adaptation emerges produces for it a set of meanings that are critically more valuable than those which can be found through a comparison with its source. This approach, however, has limits of its own. In particular within film studies, its formation into an applied methodology most often overlooks the fact that many adaptations have always been commercial products, intended to perform mercantile functions. Importantly, the production of essentially commercial adaptations is influenced

*Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University. E-mail: faubert.pl@gmail.com.
The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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significantly by the motivations of an economic industrial matrix from which they emerge. If we consider Hollywood specifically, the Hollywood film is an aesthetic genus deeply shaped by commercial concerns. In Hollywood Cinema, Richard Maltby demonstrates that Hollywood operates through a commercial aesthetic whereby the artistic and social contributions of its films are the secondary results of their financial imperatives (12). Maltby argues convincingly that it is impossible to understand Hollywood cinema without exploring the interaction of these seemingly disparate elements; yet, such interaction has rarely been considered in full in the analysis of Hollywood adaptations. This oversight invites examination because, even with adaptation studies pursuing a paradigm that reads adaptations as engaged in, and reflective of, a diverse set of cultural relationships, it persists. In particular, what tends to be overlooked, even by major theorists such as Hutcheon or Leitch, is how these relationshipsthe commercial in relation to the artistic and the socialemerge from, and are shaped by, the mode of productionthe industrial originsof adaptation. In recent years, a few critics have begun to outline the necessity of weighing these relationships when reading adaptations. Writing about the methodologies of adaptation studies, Simone Murray identifies the need to give full consideration to the origins of the production of an adaptation by identifying what we risk losing if we fail to do so:
Dematerialized, immune to commercialism, floating free of any cultural institutions, intellectual property regimes, or industry agents that might have facilitated its creation or indelibly marked its form, the adaptation exists in perfect quarantine from the troubling worlds of commerce, Hollywood, and global corporate mediaa formalist textual fetish oblivious to the disciplinary incursions of political economy, book history, or the creative industries. (5)

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In his new book, Guerric DeBona transforms this contention into the basis for a revisionist approach to adaptation studies, suggesting that a consideration of the industrial choices, audience reception and sociocultural environment guiding the production of a cinematic text leads to an understanding of adaptation more fruitful than those achieved through comparative analyses, even those informed by cultural studies (2). Intended to extend and contextualize the debate engendered by these works, the present paper demonstrates the necessity for adaptation scholarship to address more fully than it has the implications of the commercial production of adaptations. In doing so, the paper does not propose a rejection of the current foci or methodologies of the fieldin fact, far from it. In building on existing approaches, it offers a framework through which to expand the theoretical methods they already embrace. To do so, it surveys three theoretically informed categoriesappropriation, intertextuality, and authorshipeach of which is proving influential in pushing the field of adaptation studies forward.1 These categories provide us with widely used language that addresses adaptation as a cultural force; yet, when applied in the analysis of Hollywood adaptations, they prove unsuccessful in accounting for the complex and sometimes contradictory process through which such adaptations come into being. This is evident in the case study that forms the focus of this paper: Warner Bros. 1936 adaptation of Hervey Allens 1933 novel, Anthony Adverse. Though largely forgotten today, both the novel and the film were significant cultural events of their time, literary, and cinematic works that would be overshadowed only by Gone With the Wind and its adaptation later in the

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decade. The novel, which topped best-seller lists for 2 years, is a picaresque adventure, the story of a young orphan, Anthony, who is pushed around the globe, the victim of fate as he searches for his fortune. Its great success destined it not only for adaptation but also for adaptation as a prestige picture, the apex of Hollywoods offerings of the 1930s, its most prolific attempt at reaching mass audiences, and the synthesis of the powers of its production machinery. As such, the adaptation of Anthony Adverse is an attempt to reach Depression-era audiences and offers a re-contextualization of the novel. Further, it is exemplary of Warner Bros. film-making strategies during the 1930s, as well as the general production trends in Hollywood during the 1930s. It therefore demonstrates and tests the value of the categories of appropriation, intertextuality, and authorship.2 Indeed, evaluating them in relation to the film, and specifically in relation to the commercial imperatives through which it was produced, I will argue that the broadly based results sought by contemporary adaptation criticism will become more fully attainable through a methodology that reads the cultural implications of an adaptation through the rich texture of its industrial and financial dynamics.
APPROPRIATION, INTERTEXTUALITY, AND AUTHORSHIP

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In film studies, critical interest in adaptation as a cultural dialogue represents a concerted attempt to move beyond two successive paradigmsone ontological, one semiotic that previously structured the development of the field. The ontological approach, active from the 1910s through the 1970s, pitted verbal against visual meaning, thereby initiating a discourse on medium specificity, which the field now seeks to overturn. The semiotic approach, which rose to prominence in the 1970s as a reaction against ontology, offered a scientific reading that articulates the different communicative potentials of literature and cinema, dismantling orthodoxies of fidelity and hierarchism originating from earlier beliefs in the aesthetic superiority of literature. Yet, both methods gave rise to a set of problems which the field is now struggling to overcome: namely, they each implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) confirm the primacy of literature, positioning literary meaning as the fields true object of inquiry. They also position the direct comparison between an adaptation and its source as the fields core concern, and in doing so, they limit the critical value of an adaptation to a reading of its difference from its source and ultimately obscure its involvement in larger processes of social or political exchange that include both media. Responding to the reductive nature of these approaches, contemporary scholars propose adaptation as a form of cultural dialogue engaged in what is increasingly, and in a positive sense, spoken of as appropriation. For example, Julie Sanders, Robert B. Ray, and Linda Hutcheon position adaptations as invested in a cultural project more important than the simple exploitation of previous works. Literary critic Sanders offers appropriation as the transformation of an existing work into a wholly new cultural product and domain (26). Sanders reads adaptation as a focused announced form of appropriation in which adapters edit and revise their sources to bring them forth in a new light (1819). Similarly, Ray proposes adaptation as the act of citing an existing work within a new discursive context (4446). Both lines of reasoning are echoed by Linda Hutcheon who argues that adaptations always exist in spaces lateral to their sources, rather than below them in some kind of hierarchical chain (171). For

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Hutcheon, adaptation functions as a system of diffusion whereby adaptations produce distinctly new creations that not only address the works they adapt but also transform those sources so as to create new interpretations without basis in the originals themselves (17072).3 This practice of reading adaptation as the selection and repositioning of existing works within new contexts is greatly enriched by the category of intertextuality. This category has been elaborated primarily by Robert Stam who, in a series of recent works with Alessandra Raengo, argues that cinema, like the novel, is involved in a dialogic relationship with the culture that produces it. Stam argues that films are open to the infinite and open-ended possibilities generated by all the discursive practices of a culture, practices which reach a text not only through recognizable citations but also through a subtle process of indirect textual relays (Theory 27).4 Adaptation is therefore a specialized mode of film-making that brings together two networks of intertextual references, one present in the source text and one created by the adapted film (Theory 27). This reading positions adaptation, as Thomas Leitch notes, as a text immersed in a vast network of other texts, from each of which it borrows both knowingly and incidentally (Crossroads 63). Originally intended to challenge the notion that adaptation seeks to reconstruct a single fixed meaning, intertextuality also complicates a reading of adaptation as appropriation. For example, Baz Luhrmanns frequently referenced film, William Shakespeares Romeo + Juliet (1996), appropriates Shakespeares well-known narrative as a part of the media culture that emerged widely in North America during the 1990s. However, the new set of meanings it produces for Shakespeares play emerge through its linking of the intertextual connections of that work, created through performances, previous adaptations, critical discussions, and cultural references, to a number of mid-1990s cinematic trends, such as the hyper-stylization that emerged from the music video, to which the film directly refers. However, intertextuality poses a problem. By pointing to a network of textual connections that threatens to be limitless, it risks devaluing the specific projects of appropriation in which adaptations may be engaged.5 Concerned with establishing a manageable framework in which to contain the study of adaptations, a number of critics have turned to authorshipindeed, to the authorial intent discernible in the secondary work, in the adaptation. Hutcheon, for example, in comparing the multiple twentieth-century adaptations of a single story, uses authorial intent to negotiate the different sets of meanings they develop. Using biographical details, she establishes for each adapter a set of authorial concerns that explain the aesthetic and narrative changes each imposes on the original work. She thereby constrains a potentially vast object of study within a twofold category: who adapts and why (see 95105). In a similar vein, Thomas Leitchpointing to the work of one directoruses authorship to give meaning to the diverse adaptations made by Alfred Hitchcock. He suggests that Hitchcocks career as an adapter from the 1920s to the 1970s involves the assimilation of both known and unknown literature into a unique directorial style. In doing so, Leitch argues, Hitchcock adapts by wrest[ing] authorship away from the original work and asserting his own presence as an author (Auteur 10910). In his view, a Hitchcock adaptation like Rebecca (1940, from Daphne DuMauriers 1938 novel) places its literary source into a new intertextual context, consisting of both Hitchcocks

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previous films and the carefully honed publicity surrounding his work. In this context, Hitchcocks adaptations serve to deepen the directorial presence known as Hitchcock, increasing the connotations of a Hitchcock film (see 10811). Christine Geraghty in turn offers an analysis of authorship in adaptation that contrasts with Leitchs, yet that also inadvertently opens his argument by giving us further options through which to understand how authorial presence guides the reception of an adaptation. Geraghty examines the influence of the figures of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen in adaptations of their work in which these authors are foregrounded as a means of structuring the reception of their material.6 The perception of Dickens and Austen as culturally important, produced through their evaluation in different media, both recently and in the past, as well as through the numerous previous adaptations of their work, becomes bound to these adaptations, announcing for them a level of cultural significance (1516). In contrast to Leitch, Geraghty argues that it is the original authors of these adaptations who provide a plane of focus on which their numerous outward extensions are synthesized.7 Appropriation, intertextuality, and authorship offer a way of considering current tendencies within critical work on adaptation. These categories remind us that the field is moving quickly away from the precept, once so central to its methods, that film is a substratum of literature. In fact, current work points ultimately to an understanding of adaptation as a form of discourse. Francesco Cassetti terms adaptation the reappearance of discourse. He argues that literature and film are discursive formations, that their aesthetic presentation, institutional contexts, and the corpus of their works function together as reservoirs of social meaning, and that adaptation practices participate in and contribute to that meaning (80). What is at stake in adaptation then is the reappearance of an element (a plot, a theme, a character, etc.) that has previously appeared elsewhere, a reappearance that is accompanied by discursive implications already always at work in the original (82). Cassetti thereby names an overarching function that is implied in the work of these other theorists: the act of adapting is a discursive eventa point stressed by Robert Stam (Dialogics 68)in which specific adaptations select, amplify, contest, and repurpose the works they adapt.
ADAPTATION IN HOLLYWOOD

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In the past, critics have leaned towards a view of the Hollywood studio system as a monolithic force of artistic oppression and cultural stagnation.8 Recently, however, scholars have challenged such simplistic preconceptions and redefined Hollywood as a complex and, indeed, nuanced commercial producer of culture. In Hollywood Cinema, Richard Maltby redefines how we should think of Hollywood in general. For him, the Hollywood film, whether in the 1930s or throughout the past 100 years, is a mode of film-making that emerges from a matrix of industrial presuppositions and commercial requirements. In arguing this, Maltby offers a precept that complements, but also qualifies the view, developed initially by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, that Hollywood cinema, in the time frame of the 1930s (which is my focus here), functions through classicist principles. Maltby suggests that the rigorous aesthetic and thematic conventions that comprise the Hollywood style and narrative are better understood through the lens of economic opportunism

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(1419). As Maltby claims, the artistic, social, or political implications of the Hollywood product are rooted first in Hollywoods position as a cultural industry. Following Maltbys lead, we can come to an understanding of Hollywood as a place where specific studios worked within a larger industrial framework, each striving in its own way towards the goal of generating profits by attracting vast heterogeneous audiences. And, though it is overly reductive to suggest this goal as the sole outcome sought by the Hollywood studiosindeed, financial imperatives often worked in concert with other, including artistic, intentionsit was nonetheless a key determinant shaping a studios output. The clarity of the Hollywood narrative structure, the self-effacement of its visual style, the Hollywood star system, the prominence of the Hollywood genre film, and even the foregrounding of specific ideologies seemingly entrenched in Hollywood are financially driven elements adopted by those who work within the Hollywood system as part of its process of film production. These elements represent points in an industrial matrix through which the material of films must pass and through which it is shaped by concerns that exceed its content. Therefore, these elements mark a tension in Hollywood film between insistence on commercial production and the desire for creating a culturally significant artefact. Maltby, to look at him more closely, fuses his analysis of the art and culture of Hollywood films with the sociological, political, and economic bases from which they emerge. We can go back to 1992 to find him showing that the practices of adapting in Hollywood during the 1930s were calculated financial investments. In the essay, To Prevent the Prevalent Type of Book, he argues that the overarching interest of Hollywood studios producing adaptations was not fidelity. Rather, quoting Jeffrey Sconce, he contends that Hollywood used adaptations to convert the cultural capital of the novel back into the economic capital of a successful motion picture (82). Maltby shows that during this era Hollywood studios frequently adapted novels that had earned public notoriety for salacious content. He demonstrates that the studios had little intention of adapting this content to the screen and were interested primarily in using the reputations of these novels to attract audiences. Herein the context of an investigation of censorship in Hollywoodhe argues that Hollywood studios adapted such novels into affirmations of traditional American values as a means of demonstrating their commitment to the standards and expectations of virtually any American audience. However, his essay nonetheless points to commercial imperatives, to Hollywoods blunt commercial interest [. . .] in occupying a mediating position between authors and audiences, and to its position as a cultural median between literary works and the widespread public consumption of them (93). In light of Maltbys arguments, it is important to reconsider the types of cultural dialogue in which Hollywood adaptations participate, in order to establish a means of understanding how they function as the types of discursive events alluded to by Francesco Cassetti. In the 1930s, adaptation was part of the larger commercial practices of Hollywood, which adapted frequently and, as Maltbys investigation of censorship reveals, often announced openly that they were doing so. Nevertheless, when adapting, Hollywood was involved in a process of discursive production akin to that outlined by contemporary adaptation scholars. But a full consideration of how this discursive production is shaped by the industrial matrix of Hollywood is lacking in adaptation studies

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as a whole.9 Even critics such as Stam and Leitch, who acknowledge the importance of considering film production as part of the context in which an adaptation emerges, forego such a consideration in their own analyses. The field therefore risks falling short of the comprehensive understanding of cinematic adaptation that it has set as its own goal and overlooks how a culturally significant adaptation may also be a pragmatic response to a set of financial goals. When considering how a Hollywood adaptation appropriates its literary source, adaptation scholars must account in significant detail for how the cultural dialogue initiated by an adaptation is shaped by Hollywoods commercial aesthetic. Whether of works by William Faulkner or Zane Grey, in the 1930s, Hollywood adaptations were almost exclusively subject to the economic logic of the Hollywood studios. As a result, the cultural meanings that adaptations represent reflect, above all, the presence of Hollywoods production trends and imperatives as key filters that precede any cross-media negotiation of the critical engagementcomparative or otherwiseof a literary source.
ANTHONY ADVERSE AND THE DEPRESSION

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In 1934, Warner Bros. bought the rights to Hervey Allens novel, Anthony Adverse. Published in 1933, the novels sales were so impressive that it was credited with revitalizing the publishing industry after the first years of the Depression. Further, celebrated by audiences and critics alike, it was claimed as the best-loved book of its time and as the progenitor of a new literary trend, the Anthony Adverse cycle of adventure novels.10 Published in an era when Hollywood studios were each investing up to $600,000 per year on potentially lucrative literary properties, this successful novel was destined for the screen.11 Warner Bros. acquired it for the significant sum of $40,000, and it subsequently went through a lengthy production period that was well publicized by the studio and the press. The film version was released in 1936 to commercial success, playing for 8 weeks at the Cathay Circle, a major first-run theatre in Los Angeles.12 The public prominence of Allens novel meant that audiences, whether or not they had read it, would regard the film as an adaptation. Indeed, the studio took care to craft for it this literary status. As the productions historian Nick Roddick notes, the studios publicity campaign extolled the novel as important a reason to see the film as the films grandiose production values (6162)this at a time when high production values were a primary indicator of a films importance. In fact, the poster for Anthony Adverse offers the film as Warner Bros. presentation of the novel by prominently displaying not only the novel itself but also its authors name, foregrounded within the films credits, which themselves appear on the novels cover.13 Critics, of course, picked up on this highly touted relationship and some chose to criticize the film as an adaptation (Roddick 59). Not surprisingly, such criticisms fell to the category of fidelity. Frank Nugents 1936 review, for example, lambasted the film for failing to reproduce the novel exactly and for betraying its philosophy, characters, and structure (Anthony 16). Yet, that Nugent did not see on screen a faithful reproduction of the novel is not surprising. For one thing, the transformation of 1,200 pages of a literary text into 2 hours of screen time will require significant excisions, and the characters and structure will be affected. However, his attention to the philosophy expressed in the respective works demands more attention. Indeed, it signals again the need to

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proceed along new lines of investigation. An analysis of the novel and the film, as well as of the context in which the adaptation was produced, reveals the film version to be invested in a distinct form of creativity. It is interested more in appropriating Allens novel into a specific discourse than in being faithful to its content. And to go further: upon examining the influence of the production practices of Warner Bros. on the process of adapting Anthony Adverse, it becomes evident that this discursive project is deeply, and in surprising ways, affected by the commercial origins of the adaptation. The major change in the film version is that it explicitly connects the story of the novel to the Depression. In doing so, the film announces a sociocultural importance for the novel that the novel itself does not carry. This discursive change is, at least in part, a product of the ideological position of HollywoodWarner Bros. includedin the mid-1930s. The production of the film in 193435 coincides with an historical moment in which popular sentiment towards the Depression was changing. Following the inauguration of President Roosevelt in 1934, and the introductions of both the New Deal and the National Recovery Administration, Americans felt a sense of hope that the crushing first years of the economic crisis were over and that the financial health of their country would indeed bounce back (see Dobbs 21617; Rubin 9394). Many critics agree that, at this time, there was a noticeable change in the form of Hollywoods output, evidence it remained in tune with shifts in the zeitgeist. During the early years of the Depression (193033), Hollywood had offered harsh nihilistic critiques of social institutions failing to provide for their charges.14 Then, following the New Deal, and its own public endorsement of the National Recovery Act, Hollywood replaced pessimism with optimism (see Dobbs; Rubin; Ohmer). At first, films represented changing attitudes through what Martin Rubin, quoting Thomas Doherty, calls a New Deal in the last reel (94). Such films begin by embracing the same level of social criticism present in the early 1930s but reverse their stances in the last few minutes through affirmations of American values such as individual freedom, moral virtue, and limitless prosperity. By the mid-1930s, however, Hollywood films were presenting what Susan Ohmer refers to as narratives of struggle, loss and continuing hope, stories which reinforce the moral, social, and economic tenets of traditional American society (Ohmer 16263; cf. Sklar).15 By directly addressing the hardship of the Depression, these films present hopeful affirmations of America as a nation where, though many are suffering badly, life remains full of the promise of happiness. In other words, between 1933 and 1936, Hollywood was itself offering a crafted purposeful response to the Depression. Through commercially oriented commitments to the National Recovery Administration, as well as to popular opinion, Hollywood had year by year shifted gear into a revitalized celebration of traditional American values. Warner Bros. adaptation of Anthony Adverse reflects this mid-1930s discourse, offering a direct response to the emerging ethos of hope. And, though we should not restrict its meaning solely to a demonstration of its zeitgeistigkeitsuch a move is itself too limitingits reflection of contemporaneous sociocultural values forms within the adaptation a cultural dialogue working well outside concerns of fidelity. Set in Napoleonic Europe between 1775 and 1815, the 1933 novel tells the tale of Anthony, an orphan, who through a series of struggles in Italy, Africa, and North America seeks a fortune and family of his own. However, the 1936 film, directed by

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Warners veteran, Mervyn Leroy, restructures the novels presentation of the title character Anthony as a means of addressing a popular contemporaneous sentiment about the Depression. Most notable, the passive Anthony of the novel, victimized by a corrupt society, becomes in the film an active force who addresses this victimization as part of a struggle necessary to endure in reaching his goals. This single reorientation, which selects a theme of individualism in the novel and amplifies it, uses the process of adaptation to transform the focus of the work into a mid-decade address of the Depression. This transformation is signalled by the films epigraph, not present in the novel, which reads, those who are destined to live during times of war and social upheaval are victims of a cruel fateunable to find comfort in the past or peace in the present. They are the spiritual orphans of the world. Through this thinly veiled reference to America in the early and mid-1930s, Anthonys struggles during Napoleonic times are rendered as a form of turmoil equivalent to that endured in the United States during the early 1930s. Indeed, seen in this light, the film can be read as a social criticism that allegorizes the commentaries present in the optimistic films emerging mid-decade. His biological father dead and his mother dying during childbirth, Anthony is born to a cruel corrupt French aristocrat who immediately abandons him to a life of poverty simply because Anthonys birth interferes with his personal ambition. Anthony is then adopted by John Bonnyfeather, a Scottish merchant working in Italy, whose business he later joins. The wealth they accumulate, however, is later threatened when Napoleon invades Italy, upsetting the existing structures of power and of daily life. Anthony is then forced on a journey that leads him through Cuba and Africa, a journey that costs him his marriage and that tests his faith in the civilized world. Anthony does temporarily recoup the Bonnyfeather fortune, only to lose it again to corrupt aristocrats greedily bent on personal gain. The film ends with Anthony setting sail for America where, even penniless, he can have peace of mind and live the life of his own choosing. Mirroring popular criticisms of the government during the Depression, in selecting and developing this one narrative thread the film presents the novel as dramatizing an exchange between a ruling class, the corrupt old regime of aristocracy, and a selfmade middle class represented by Anthony and the merchant Bonnyfeatherwhose Scottish background aligns him with those who have made their way through hard work. In both versions of the story, the aristocratic class consciously lays waste to the middle class to preserve its own comfort and ambition. Yet, in the film, this exchange remains within the European and colonial settings of the novel, preventing it from appearing as a direct commentary on the American Depression. Therefore, when the film ends with Anthony leaving for America, and for his freedom and happiness, the film establishes an Old World/New World dichotomy in which America is relieved of the very problems for which it is being criticized. In its final scene, the film thus introduces a new focus, and the hardships of the Depression are confined to Europe while America, as a place where life is free and full of promise, remains a point of hope within a discourse originally intended to challenge it. Part New Deal in the last reel, part tale of struggle, loss and continuing hope, the adaptation of Anthony Adverse, to use a term introduced to adaptation studies by Robert B. Ray, refunctions Allens novel by situating it within a new context. As such, the adaptation of the novel is appropriated into the larger discourse of Hollywoods address of the socio-political implications of the

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Depression mid-decade, and the film suggests that the story developed in the novel version of Anthony Adverse implies a particular understanding of the economic crisis, using the authority of the novel to legitimate a social view that actually lies outside its own boundaries.16 This narrative reorganization represents an act of appropriation, a moment in which a popular novel is altered and put to work within a new discursive sphere. Yet, we would be short-sighted to end our discussion here. The sociocultural appropriation of the novel is preceded by its subjection to a number of industrial constraints present both at the Warner Bros. studio and in Hollywood more generally. And, though we gain a greater understanding of the film by reading it socioculturally, we cannot fully understand its formation as an adaptation without pushing our reading one step further, that is, without identifying the role these constraints have in shaping the film discursively. To begin, the commercial success of the novel version of Anthony Adverse destined it for adaptation as a prestige picture. A major production trend of the 1930s, prestige pictures were amplified versions of A-level productions, grandiose undertakings offering the acme of Hollywoods various forces of production. Film scholar Tino Balio, quoting the Motion Picture Herald trade paper, argues that prestige pictures of the 1930s were drawn exclusively from four sources: canonical nineteenth-century European literature, Shakespeares plays, contemporary Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novels, and biographies of men of known worth (17980).17 As such, they are also Hollywoods openly announced adaptations, what Chris Cagle terms the offerings of Hollywoods high culture, presenting important literature and serious themes of social value (294). Therefore, as a production trend, the prestige picture is an intertextual vehicle wherein practices of adaptation both confer importance onto the sources adapted as prestige pictures and wherein the importance of the literary originals is used to assert the cultural importance of the trend itself (Balio 17980). In other words, old-fashioned adaptation values of fidelity play a role in obscuring more pertinent and more urgent dynamics. The pretense of fidelity is therefore a core selling point for these films. They purport to uphold the values of the works they adapt, and the public fictions that exist for them, even when altering their content dramatically. Anthony Adverse, for example, continually foregrounds its literary status through a series of inter-titles, which use the same font and background as the epigraph and are written in a generic novelistic style that signals the presence of the novel behind the film. These titles work with the films narrative reorganization of the novel version and transform the films epigraphic announcement of its relevance for the Depression, making it appear as though that relevance originates from the book itself. These titles also bring the illusion of fidelity into the film, positioning it as a representation of what has already been publicly confirmed as the novel versions socially important project. Producing Anthony Adverse as a prestige picture is therefore itself a discursive operation, the film thereby presenting itself as a culturally important adaptation of a culturally important source work. The decision to adapt the film as a prestige picture was no doubt a financial one. In the 1930s, prestige pictures garnered audiences larger than standard A-level productions. Such audiences, in combination with higher ticket prices and longer runs, meant that these films (if they were in fact successful) could recoup production costs more

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quickly than A-level films, something essential to Hollywood studios battling hard times during the Depression (Balio 180). That Warner Bros. approached Anthony Adverse as, they hoped, a sure-fire financial investment is reflected in the contract with which they purchased the rights to adapt the novel, which contains the option for Warner Bros. to include up to eight musical numbers in the finished film (Roddick 31). Adapting a novel in which music does not figure prominently, this seemingly unlikely negotiation represents an ambitious commercial urge underpinning the decision to make the film. Specifically, it reflects Warner Bros. own recent experience. When the rights were purchased in 1934, Warner Bros. was enjoying the financial successes of the musical genre films Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street. This contract confirms how the decision to produce Anthony Adverse would have been pragmatic and how it reflects the studios intention to create the film in the manner most suited to commercial gain, rather than that most suited to the spirit of the novel. The rights contract also points to the financial risk generated by the immense cost of producing this type of film, risk that ultimately affects how the film is able to present the material of the novel. In 1930, Warner Bros. had just spent a significant amount of its capital developing sound, acquiring theatres, and expanding its operations (see Schatz 136). The lowering of revenues that accompanied the Depression put the studio in financial difficulty and, though its financial aims equalled (then) fiscally sound studios such as MGM and Paramount, Warner Bros. could not budget its A-level productions as they could. Tighter purse strings led to budgetary constraints that, in fact, are evident in the visual style of Anthony Adverse. For example, though, for Warner Bros., it was a mammoth production, the studio had to be financially extraordinarily cautious with the vast sets required for the film. In his production history, Nick Roddick includes a memo sent from production manager Hal B. Wallis to the art department during production, excoriating them for spending too much on lavish sets unnecessary in communicating the bare bones of the dramatic events (quoted in Roddick 4849). The memo also indicates that the expense of the sets forced the studio to build only small sections of those required and to film them tightly. Thus, the studio had to forego a larger sense of atmosphere and instead pay close attention visually to the principal characters. This financial necessity, which visually impels major scenes in the film to be organized around a close presentation of Anthony, directly affects the films appropriation of the novel as a tale of individual struggle, as well as its presentation of Anthony as an active hero, who indeed dominates in the tighter compositions of many scenes. The risks associated with prestige pictures were large and, besides cutting costs, Hollywood studios worked in a number of different ways, including pretested filmmaking formulas, to ensure they achieved necessary returns at the box office. Beyond adhering to popular genres, this strategy often meant that studios constrained these films by situating them within the limits of the individualist goal-oriented narratives commonly central to Hollywood film-making throughout the entire studio era.18 Indeed, the narrative reorganization of Anthony Adverse is in part a response to these larger constraints that lie outside of its Depression-era context, maintaining Hollywoods essentially conservative attitude towards the role of the protagonist. Several of the changes suggested by Allen to Gibney involved preserving the mystical character of the novel (Roddick 3334), by which the passive nature of Anthony as a victim of larger

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fates would be preserved. However, Gibney was subject to conventional pressures, to the demands of the Hollywood film; he admits in a studio memo that in ignoring Allens suggestions, he was developing a larger interest in reorganizing Anthony as an active hero (Roddick 34, 39). By adhering to such conventions, and by writing Anthony as an active hero, Gibney therefore rendered the film more optimistic, a change through which, regardless of his own engagement with the Depression, he crafted the films pointed response to it. Beyond these varied interactions with the specific production trend in which the film was made, its narrative reorganization was influenced further by interactions between Warner Bros. and the Production Code. The Code, of course, was an industry-wide process of self-censorship, an initiative designed to contain Hollywood films within a particular moral framework. However, the Code is now increasingly also seen as being a financial imperative, a method of attracting the greatest possible audience by devising a moral stance that alienated no one and that met with broad nods of approval. Both the script and the final cut of Anthony Adverse were revised by request of the Production Code Administration (PCA). One of the several changes requested by the PCA involved removing Anthonys relationship with an indigenous woman during his sojourn as a slave trader in Africa. In the novel, the explicit sexuality of this relationship, in which Anthony is being unfaithful to his European wife, is a sign, albeit a racist and misogynist one, of his victimization by his immoral, yet financially necessary profession. Originally, this romantic relationship was preserved in the film, presumably to a similar effect, and was removed only because the Code considered inappropriate the specific and definite suggestion that [the couple is] engaged in illicit sex (quoted in Roddick 37, see also 3839). Interestingly, excising this relationship is a production device, a response to an industry-wide policy of censorship, with implications in the narrative of the film. This excision alters dramatically the films intended presentation of its source text, removing a sign of Anthonys victimization that would not only align it more faithfully with its source text but also disrupt the process of appropriation outlined above. Its removal, however, redirects our attention to Anthony as an active individual, a move of significant discursive importance. Beyond interactions with the Code, the narrative reorganization that comprises the films appropriation of the original novel is again further structured through the three authorial figures, each of whose presence is determined by the production regime of the Warner Bros. studio. First, Hervey Allen guides the presentation of the film, his publicly established persona as a well-known novelist confirming the films social value. Warner Bros. was careful to ensure this connection, gaining his support for the production and sending screenwriter Sheridan Gibney for a publicized meeting with Allen, at which Allen made numerous suggestions for the treatment of his novel (Roddick 39). Many of these suggestions were not incorporated into Gibneys script (39); however, the meeting itself was a means of announcing Allens cooperation with the production and of maintaining the right to foreground his authorial presence centrally in the publicity campaign. Indeed, Allens biographer, Stuart Knee, suggests that he had virtually no significant involvement in the scripting and production processes (see 26770). Again, such a move was oriented towards marketing the significant reworking of the film version of Anthony Adverse by using the popularity of the original.

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Yet, in doing so, the studio retained the potential to offer the film as Warner Bros. presentation of Hervey Allens Anthony Adverse, confirming its discursive refunctioning of the novel not only as part of the vision of the novel and, here, of its author as well but also as a product of its own design. Second, the use of the particular stars of the film, Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland, would have guided its reception. In the 1930s, Hollywood embraced a star system whereby stars, contracted to appear in the productions and publicity of a single studio, developed personas that were then marketed to audiences. These well-crafted personas, as Richard Dyer notes, allow Hollywood stars to signify on two levels, their real presences outshining the characters they represent (22). On screen, stars are seen as performing characters, thereby imbuing their roles with their personas. In Anthony Adverse, Fredric March proves crucial in positioning the films response to the Depression. While Warner Bros. succeeds in repurposing Anthony Adverse in part because it cites America so strongly in its final scene, this citation works because Anthony is played by March. Despite having played foreigners in a number of recent films, such as The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and Anna Karenina (1935), March, who was born in Wisconsin and who carries a distinct midwestern accent, appears very much the American; indeed, his early career is marked by his playing Americans in films like Designs for Living (1933). In Anthony Adverse, March imbues his performance of Anthonys struggle with a distinct American persona. In fact, when March was cast, at least one fan of the novel (with its by then un-American orientation) wrote to Warner Bros. denouncing him as simply too American to play the part (quoted in Roddick 40). Yet, when the film ends with Anthony extolling the virtues of America while on the prow of a ship bound for its shores, we are given not the image of a soon-to-be expatriate but of an American reaffirming the values of his homeland, an image that ties together the thematic transformation this adaptation represents. Like the other elements of the production of the film, the crucial casting of March was motivated by commercial as much as dramatic or other interests. In 1935, during production, Warner Bros. had no suitable star to play Anthony and, needing to borrow one, was confined to three choices, Britons Robert Donat and Leslie Howard, and the American, Fredric March.19 Though Donat was most likely never seriously considered, press coverage at the time suggests that Howard was the top contender for the role. He was later dropped, for reasons unspecified,20 yet potentially because (again for reasons not entirely clear) he spoke ill of Hollywood and of the novel version of Anthony Adverse in an interview with the New York Times Hollywood correspondent (see Nugent, Howard X5). He would, needless to say, have then been considered a liability as the lead in a film whose extensive publicity revolved around the investment of its stars in the material from which it was drawn.21 Warner Bros. then cast Frederic Marchwho actually resembles both Howard and Donatin part because of his recent success in prestige pictures, and in part, as Roddick notes, because they could trade their popular child star Dick Powell to borrow him from Twentieth Century Fox (40). The implications of this financial imperative are so straightforward that they are easily overlooked. As noted earlier, there is no suggestion that during the planning phases of the production March was thought to be the Anthony. Nonetheless, the injection of his persona into the film proves crucial to its overall project.

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Third, the final authorial presence is Warner Bros. itself. The film is a Warner Bros. product, though one that is markedly different from its other films, and that ultimately plays off against them. Throughout the Golden Age of Hollywood, studios had pronounced house styles, the combination of the thematic concerns of their directors and writers, the interests of their producers in particular production trends, and the specific talents of their writers, production designers, and cinematographers. In the 1930s, Warner Bros. was widely known as the socially conscious studio. In order to challenge the glamour of both MGM and Paramount, then the biggest two of the five major studios, Warners output focused heavily on social issues of labour strife, Black Fury (1935), racism, Bordertown (1935), poverty, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), and criminality, Little Caesar (1931), thereby positioning itself as an explicit chronicler of the challenges faced by America in the 1930s. Alongside films manifesting such contemporary concerns, Warner Bros. worked to confirm an equally urgent social importance for its prestige pictures. In 1935, for example, the studio released their prestige adaptation of Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream. Robert F. Wilson, Jr., notes that this film is a synthesis of Warner Bros. output in the 1930s. By including stars like James Cagney, and generic elements from screwball comedies and horror films, the film combines Warners previous efforts to address the Depression into a prestige film that advertises a new level of cultural importance (35). Indeed, to stress this new level of importance, and to establish a necessity for audiences to see the film, Warner Bros. not only previewed the film extensively to various cultural organizations (Wilson 36) but also distributed copies of the play to schools, literary societies and cultural groups [and] planted stories and photographs of the principal cast and crew at work in hundreds of newspapers and magazines (Balio 190). Therefore, when Warner Bros. lavished on Anthony Adverse a publicity campaign like no other it had done before, it indicated to the public that with it it had a film which in some way would represent the pinnacle of their comprehensive Depression-era address of contemporary American life.22
LOOKING FORWARD

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My discussion of Anthony Adverse demonstrates the extent to which we can productively draw on the categories of appropriation, intertextuality, and authorship to identify the larger discursive projects in which Hollywood adaptations may be involved. Warner Bros. adaptation uses a network of both explicit and implicit intertextual referencesinvolving the engagement of contemporaneous Hollywood ideologies, of production trends, and of authorial figuresinitiated through the change in medium from novel to film as a means of developing, enriching, and contextualizing the narrative reorganization of its source text. The film version of Anthony Adverse thereby refunctions Allens novel and figures itself as an important contribution to a cultural dialogue, which is not limited to its engagement with the novel itself. But my analysis also points to two interrelated systems of production, the Hollywood studio system and, within it, the specific production regime of the Warner Bros. studio, both of which collaboratively influence the shape of the adaptation. Yet, this discussion also reveals that a largely theoretical analysis of the discursive potential of Hollywood

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adaptations leads to an incomplete reading of the cultural dialogues they initiate. Without a close analysis of the financial and industrial imperatives behind the production of adaptations, a fuller and more complex understanding of the cultural context in which they emerge is unobtainable. The cultural position of the film version of Anthony Adverse stems from the particular financial and industrial strategies of Warner Bros., strategies that emerge from the needs of the studio and from the operations of the Hollywood industry in general. These examples lead then, though with special attention to the specifics of time and place, to the need for a broad understanding of Adverse as an adaptation, and of how, in general, we can conceive of adaptation as a cultural eventit is simply too risky to read Anthony Adverse as a sociocultural response to the Depression without addressing the various pressures through which that response is created. As a result, these examples challenge key ideas emerging in adaptation theory by demonstrating that the boundaries of the theoretical categories the field now embraces extend beyond its current focus. Indeed, when Mervyn Leroy referred to the novel as perfect picture material, it was not only because it was a literary sensation, not only because it already had an audience, and not only because it could speak to its era (quoted in Roddick 62). It was because, through a combination of such different elements, it was well suited to becoming a Hollywood film saleable across all markets. By exploring adaptation through the criteria of appropriation, intertextuality, and authorship, current scholarship seeks to understand how adaptations develop a set of meanings that lie outside the sources from which they adapt. Anthony Adverse confirms this position, yet also frustrates it, because the various meanings we can construct for the film extend beyond any narrowly defined cultural context in which it is located and into the layers that involve its industrial production. Writing about film-making in Hollywood today, Kristin Thompson suggests that the current proliferation of adaptation is evidence that Hollywood studios are looking for something more than a wellcrafted film. Thompson is referring to the desire for sequels specifically, but her argument reveals that studios adapt in large measure as a form of financial investment and that the meaning of many adaptationsher example being The Lord of the Rings trilogylies in their negotiation of existing audiences, contemporary social concerns, and the mercantile potential of commercial films. In this respect, the film version of Anthony Adverse reveals that adaptation is not solely an act of appropriation but rather also a complex act of negotiation. In Anthony Adverse, social concern about the Depression, public opinion about Allens novel, and the specific industrial intentions and designs of the Warner Bros. studio merge together. Adhering to a commercial aesthetic, the film repurposes the novel and places itself discursively in the cross-currents of artistic production and economic opportunism. We need not worry, either, about giving preference to one current of analysis over the other. In fact, as Maltbys definition of the commercial aesthetic ultimately highlights, it is in these very cross-currents that an accurate understanding of a Hollywood film is to be found. As such, a comprehensive reading of the adaptation of Anthony Adverse offers a means of achieving the sociological turn sought 20 years ago by Dudley Andrew, demonstrating in one context how adaptation serves the cinema and, in another, through what conditions the cinema appropriates literature.

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As a result, Warner Bros. adaptation of Anthony Adverse ultimately confirms, and in turn complicates, contemporary approaches to adaptation. Its connection to a contemporaneous social concern demonstrates a desire beyond fidelity, indeed a desire to resist fidelity in favour of a cultural contribution, guiding its production. However, its origins in a specific economic, industrial framework demonstrate that its cultural contribution was not the sole driving force behind its fruition. Robert B. Ray concludes his essay on the field of adaptation studies with the question: what do we need to know? (48). He then argues that proposals for future work must take into account what the field still needs to understand about adaptations and where we should look in order to get there. Thomas Leitch, however, fears that this question has become a prison, the too-numerous analytical possibilities offered by adaptation studies effectively paralysing critics coming to the field (Crossroads 70). Yet, by exploring cultural interventions in relation to commercial imperatives, we can, in certain times and certain places, locate a plane on which to synthesize the different frameworks circulating the field. Scholars current desire to locate adaptations in increasingly large social processes, to read them as discursive formations within a broad and often contradictory sphere, as the products of specific authors, and as part of a larger chain of intertextual dissemination, can be focused by reading adaptations not only through the artistic context in which they emerge but also through the clear, definable industrial context in which they are produced.
NOTES
In Film Adaptation during the Studio Era, Guerric DeBona posits three similar categories developing the methodologies of adaptation studies, substituting only cultural value, the existing discourse surrounding a work, for what I have termed appropriation. 2 Nick Roddick, in his 1983 survey of Warner Bros. in the 1930s, offers both a history of the production of Anthony Adverse and a detailed analysis of how its production is symptomatic of the dominant approach to the film-making present at the Warners studio, and in Hollywood, during the 1930s. I am indebted to his account, which I draw on throughout the paper. 3 As an example, Hutcheon offers Woody Allens Play it Again, Sam (1972) as an announced adaptation of the thematic concerns of Casablanca (1942), two works which are rarely seen as having anything in common other than a sparse few intertextual allusions (17273). 4 Stam again develops this line of thinking again in another essay (see Dialogics). 5 Several critics have turned to Gerard Genettes concept of transtextuality, which offers five types of intertextuality through which to explain the multitude of textual connections engaged by any given text. Regarding the influence of Genette on adaptation studies, see Stam, Dialogism 6566. For a different, yet successful approach to limiting the number of possible intertextual allusions present in an adaptation, see Thomas Leitchs extensive classification of the different levels of adaptation available in a work (see Allusion). 6 This potential of the figure of Dickens is examined extensively by DeBona (see 3763). 7 Amy Heckerlings Clueless (1995), for example, a widely celebrated contemporized adaptation of Jane Austens Emma (1815), contains numerous intertextual references, both to the emerging star personas of its principal cast (Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd), as well as to youth culture in the 1990s. However, it is the latent presence of Jane Austen that structures the reception of this film as an adaptation, connecting it to a contemporaneous trend of Austen adaptations (Sense and Sensibility [1995], Mansfield Park [1999]) and to an emerging discourse on the value of Austens literature in postmodern society. 8 The auteur theory is the archetypal approach of this paradigm, suggesting individual directors as creative forces producing art within the confines of an industry without vision or soul. 9 Interestingly, earlier critics of adaptation, rooted in the ontological paradigm, have tried to account for the influences of Hollywoods forces of production on adaptation. For example, George Bluestone,
1

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Geoffrey Wagner, and Keith Cohen each seek to explain how Hollywoods film-making techniques are, at least in part, pragmatic financially oriented responses to its audience. However, these critics, who have largely adopted the positions of literary scholars, do not explore the production machine of Hollywood in enough depth to provide the rich analysis of which adaptation studies is clearly capable. See Bluestone 3145; Wagner; and Cohen. 10 Honours like these were bestowed on the novel by the press, which generated much interest in the actual success of the book. A description of the full extent of the success of the novel and its author can be found in Stuart Knees biography of Hervey Allen (see 25169). An interesting aside: in 1933 and 1934, Anthony Adverse looked to be the book of the 1930s. In the New York Times alone, it is mentioned several times a month consistently right up to 1935 when a new book, Margaret O. Mitchells Gone with the Wind, appears on the horizon, hinting at a potential usurper of Anthonys throne. 11 Richard Maltby indicates that in 1933, the Hollywood studios combined bought over 200 novels and non-fiction works at the cost of $2 million (Prevent 82). The $40,000 price tag of Anthony Adverse represents almost one-twelfth of the $600,000 Warner Bros. spent that year (82). In fact, Warner Bros. received a telegram from RKO producer Pandro S. Berman shortly after buying the rights, asking if they would consider selling them again to RKO (Roddick 31). 12 A first run like this exceeded the standard run of most A-level productions, which often played for 2 weeks. 13 In this respect, the poster for Anthony Adverse is markedly different from that for the supreme blockbuster of 1930s adaptations, Gone With the Wind. The latters poster features Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as iconic figures of the value of the movie, whereas the poster for Anthony features, above all, the book. Note too that type size on a movie poster noted rank within a production and was fought for in contractual negotiations. It is significant that Hervey Allens name appears in the second largest type on the poster, smaller only than the title and stars, ranking his presence just less important than that of March and de Havilland. 14 The Gangster genre, which rose to prominence at this time, exemplifies this trend, celebrating the rebellion of the gangster against legal and financial institutions as the embodiment of the perception that such institutions had let down those they were meant to serve. 15 As an example, Martin Rubin refers to the cycle of films about orphans that appeared at this time. Rubin cites Wild Boys of the Road (1933), the story of the hardships endured by a group of homeless juveniles who are rescued in the last scene of the film by a kind fatherly judge who sets them on the road to happiness and prosperity (94). 16 Biographer Stuart Knee suggests that Hervey Allen intended Anthony Adverse to be a work of depth and purpose to those suffering during the Depression. He also identifies that Allen wrote the novel largely removed from the Depression and suggests that the purpose of the novel was more its demonstration that people had suffered financially before (23740). In my own reading of the work, Anthony Adverse contains the seeds for the address of the Depression made in the film, yet does not itself allude to that address. 17 Interestingly, Anthony Adverse does not fit within these categories, Allen not having won the Pulitzer in 1933. However, its setting in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe seems to align it with Balios first grouping. 18 The formulation of this structure of film-making originates from David Bordwells essay Story Causality and Motivation, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Richard Maltby has proposed the formula presented by Bordwell as an economic imperative, suggesting its clarity as a means of audience engagement (46567, see also 47574). Tino Balios extensive survey of the production trends of the 1930s reveals how prestige pictures both exceed and embrace pretested formulas (see 179211). 19 The roster at this time consisted of stars like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson who, playing gangsters mostly, were too brash to become Anthony. The studio may have considered Errol Flynn, yet that he was a newcomer to Hollywood with no proven successFlynns first film, Captain Blood, would not be released until 1935, when Anthony Adverse was always in productionwould make him a liability for a production of this size (cf. Roddick 40). 20 Roddick suggests that Howard was never seriously considered. However, newspapers at the time, as well as Frank Nugent, who interviewed Howard for The New York Times, appear under the assumption that he was to receive the role.

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See Roddicks description of the publicity materials, including star bios, distributed to theatres presenting the film (6162). 22 William Keonig, a production manager at Warner Bros., sent a memo to studio heads extolling that Anthony Adverse was the biggest film the studio had ever attempted (quoted in Roddick 45). Its size is reflected in its publicity campaign, which exceed that of A Midsummer Nights Dream (1935), by including a nationwide contest to see which reader of the novel could best cast the film.
21

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