Adaptation
In the spring of 1988, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion began writing the script for a film entitled Golden Girl, based on Alanna Nash's biography of Jessica Savitch. When the film was finally released in 1996, eight years later, it was known as Up Close & Personal and none of the more controversial details of Savitch's private life remained:
- Savitch's erratic behaviour was supposedly due to continued drug abuse, a theory seemingly confirmed by an incoherent news update in October 1983 that led to a national outcry.
- Savitch's second husband (who was homosexual) committed suicide less than a year after they married.
- Savitch underwent an abortion procedure, later claiming that she had suffered a miscarriage.
- Most notably, Savitch died at the age of 36 in a tragic car accident, an event not depicted in the film.
According to Dunne, who chronicled his experiences dealing with studio executives in his book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, the majority of these changes were made in order to appeal to a broader mainstream market. Producer Scott Rudin was reported to have said, when asked by a weary Dunne what the film was supposed to be, "it's about two movie stars."
Read more about this topic: Up Close & Personal
Famous quotes containing the word adaptation:
“Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“In youth the human body drew me and was the object of my secret and natural dreams. But body after body has taken away from me that sensual phosphorescence which my youth delighted in. Within me is no disturbing interplay now, but only the steady currents of adaptation and of sympathy.”
—Haniel Long (1888–1956)
“The real security of Christianity is to be found in its benevolent morality, in its exquisite adaptation to the human heart, in the facility with which its scheme accommodates itself to the capacity of every human intellect, in the consolation which it bears to the house of mourning, in the light with which it brightens the great mystery of the grave.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)