Adaptive Collaboration, Collaborative Adaptation: Filming the Mamet Canon

摘要

Every migration across referential and expressive frameworks entails formal, structural, and cognitive consequences too complex for a ‘traditionalist’ comparative posture. Moreover, the intertextuality and intermediality of the ‘transmedial screenplay’ make it incompatible with ‘static’ concepts such as ‘fidelity’ and ‘originality’ precisely on behalf of the film medium's poly-systemic nature. Bringing together the analogous concerns of collaborative creation, adaptation, and authorship, this essay therefore discusses David Mamet's screen adaptations of personal and other work from a process-based perspective as a means of attaining a more constructive understanding of so-called ‘interaesthetic passages’.