For my first job after Under the Volcano I was hired to adapt Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Having succeeded with an adaptation that had defeated many previous writers, I was approached to manage another near impossible adaptation: bring Twain's novel to the screen with a fresh slant, avoid the pitfalls of it's racist roots, emphasize its complex humanity, do it without falling into stereotypes, make it relevant.
A fairly tall order.
What drew me to the project was the producer's insistence that I was free to make changes, to leave out the more cartoonish elements of the novel, to invent if necessary, to even re-write Twain. The only proviso was that if I was going to change anything in this American classic, I needed to get a committee of Twain scholars to sign off on my interpretation.
The problem with Huck Finn is the ending. Hemmingway, famously, said: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." What most people never are told‑‑a sort of literary white lie on the part of Twain critics‑‑is that Hemingway went on to say, in the next sentence; "If you read it, you must stop where Jim is stolen from the boys. That's the real end. The rest is just cheating." That sentence was my starting point in doing the script.
After giving Jim great dignity and telling what is essentially a love story between two men — slave and white trash — Twain lost nerve. Huck and Jim find their identity on the river. Every time they hit the land, they bump into a little satire of America and have to survive the episode. The whole tenor of the book is so much about defining freedom and sacrificing for freedom and trying to figure out what it is.
He didn't know what to do with this incredibly taboo relationship he had created.
So he resorts to Tom Sawyer. Tom shows up and the tone of the novel takes a rapid turn. It becomes parody when it had been serious social satire. Jim, who had a powerful dignity throughout the journey downriver, is now made the butt of schoolboy pranks. And to add insult to injury (literarily) Twain breaks out a marvelous Deus Ex Machina to wrap things up: Miss Watson, unbeknownst to Jim, had freed him in absentia. So this journey, which had been all about finding and defining freedom, with this one plot twist, is rendered moot.
I wanted to cut Miss Watson's freeing Jim. I wanted to cut Tom Sawyer playing humiliating tricks on Jim.
So off I went on a nationwide junket — Cambridge, Chicaco, California — to describe my proposed ending to various Twain scholars.
The change amounted to this: in the novel once Huck and Jim pass Cairo (and the Ohio river leading to the Northeast) they feel doomed. They believe they have missed Jim's opportunity at freedom. I wanted to use the historical fact that New Orleans, in addition to being a slaving center, was also the city with the largest free black population other than New York. So Jim could still, perhaps, find a life outside of slavery. I had Huck stand up to Sawyer, refusing to play pranks and games, and — essentially — stealing Jim. Huck heads out for the West, and Jim continues his quest for freedom downriver in New Orleans.
There's a wonderful line in the book, "You're free now, Jim. Free as any creature on earth." And in my mind, that resonates when you think through history of what the black man's quest for freedom has really entailed and what it has come to. Jim may be escaping, but he's not free. I very much wanted this more ambiguous ending. Where Jim is not quite free ‑‑ he's heading to New Orleans, but even if he gets there, how free will he be?
Every Twain scholar I talked to agreed that the novel falls apart and into parody in the last chapters. And every one signed off on my proposed abridgement and change.
I wrote the screenplay. Everybody loved it. Everybody was happy. For a few days. And then in the weeks before production was to start, the producer called me into his office and told me I had to go back to Twain's Tom Sawyer/Miss Watson ending.
The film was being made for American Playhouse at PBS, and — so I was told — they decided I had strayed too far from the text. That it was a classic. That I had to put back the peculiar shift and tone and convenient resolution.
I argued. I refused. I told them if they wanted to go back to Twain's ending they would have to do it themselves.
And they did.
It's true that when you're doing an adaptation of a classic you have certain responsibilities. But any time you do an adaptation of a novel, you're going to change something. You can't help it.
Ironically, the changes that they made without me (I have no idea who did the writing) were no less extreme than the changes I wanted to make. They just weren't in the direction that mine would have been.
Here is a copy of the three-hour version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on Scribd.com.
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