Lights! Camera! Author! Authorship as Hollywood performance

This article uses an intransitive model of adaptation, whereby texts adapt (themselves) rather than get adapted by others, to set adaptation, the tendency of texts to change to attract new audiences, against authorship, the tendency of other hands to constrain these changes through moral and legal sanctions. Although the conflict between adaptation and authorship may seem absolute, the Hollywood film-making industry, especially in its highly ambivalent treatment of writers, offers numerous possibilities for complicating the relationship between adaptation and authorship. The article considers the cases of Charles Dickens, William Faulkner and Charlie Chan to raise questions about authorship, and proposes a model of authorship as a collaborative, adaptive performance created, ratified and policed by the authorship industry rather than an existential fact.