Berstein, Matthew. "Perfecting the New Gangster: Writing "Bonnie and Clyde"." Film Quarterly 53(2000): 16-31 

Mathew Bernstein’s article in a 2000 publication of Film Quarterly entitled The New Gangster revolves around the writing and meaning of Bonnie and Clyde. The article covers the famed screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman and their obsession with French New Wave cinema and how it influenced the writers’ treatment and final draft of Bonnie and Clyde.
The article cites the two Esquire writers essay, The New Sentimentality, as their inspiration and foundation for their Bonnie and Clyde project. Bonnie and Clyde represented everything their essay stood for, “Bonnie and Clyde is about style and people who have style. It is about people whose style set them apart from their time and place so that they seemed odd and aberrant to the general run of society” (19).
The article then covers the gradual progression of the script from being a purely New Wave, irregular narrative, to a more classical, Hollywood narrative and back again. Oddly enough Bernstein claims that Francois Truffaut, while he was involved with the project, did more to Americanize the script than anything else. It was Arthur Penn that finally realized the film’s potential to break down barriers between American films and European art cinema.
The most interesting part of the progression of the film’s script comes from the racy sexuality that was originally part of the film. The first treatment of the script contained an active and well functioning sex life for the two protagonists, which of course was later switched to Clyde’s asexuality. The original script even contained strong hints of a threesome between Bonnie, Clyde and their partner C.W. Moss. However W.D. Jones, the actor originally cast for the role of Moss, was an entirely different actor, “he was an air-head, blond stud” (20). The final script shows a scene where Bonnie shrugs when Clyde turns her down, clearly sexually frustrated, but, “by contrast, in the first script draft, Bonnie casually walks to the door of the room and yells for Jones to come in to help them get going, as if she was calling him in for dinner” (21).
The clear toning down of the sexuality in Bonnie and Clyde can be seen as a compromise to allow the excessive violence to exist untouched. The many re-workings of the script saw a dramatic change from Benton and Newman’s original vision, but Penn and Beatty were able find the happy medium between overly New Wave and overly Hollywood.

Harrison, Stephanie.  Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005.

Harrison’s book neither deals directly with Roeg’s film, nor with du Maurier’s short story that inspired it, but it is essential to any analysis of Don’t Look Now.  The process by which a director adapts a short story into film is important, because a short story is just that, short.  A director must take something that rarely lasts over fifty pages and turn in into a film that usually lasts over two hours.  A director must take the story and ‘run with it;’ in some ways making the story his own.  Harrison analyzes 35 short stories and the films they spawned.  She separates the films and analyses into sections based mainly on genre (Horror, Western, etc.).  Don’t Look Now is a hybrid film, so it would not snugly fit in any of the genres that Harrison chooses, but it does have horror, drama, erotica, and auteur elements to it.  Harrison describes four different auteurs (Altman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Kazan) and their individual styles of adaptation.  She calls Altman, for instance, the “translator” (3), because he attempted to stay as true as possible to the original story.  There is little to no literature written about Nicholas Roeg, so it is impossible to know whether or not he would fit in with any of the different auteurs.
    One point I found very interesting in Harrison’s analysis is her idea that audiences are less hard on films based on short stories for being true to their source material, because “few short stories are embedded in the public’s consciousness in a way that popular novels are” (xvi).  In the case of Don’t Look Now, both the story and the film seem to have been lost from the public consciousness (due, in part, to the success of The Exorcist, which was released the same year as Roeg’s film).  Harrison’s book, as I said above, never mentions Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but by looking at the process by which other writers have adapted short stories, we can get a sense of the different approaches to it and how Roeg many have gone about doing it.  Roeg took a fifty-four page short story about a man’s blindness to his abilities and his fate and refashioned it into an unsettling drama/thriller about a married couple and ...

Tyler, Ralph. "'Butch Cassidy' was my western, 'Magic' is my Hitchcock." (interview with William Goldman). The New York Times 128 Nov 12 1978 sec 2 (1978): 23.
Document Type: FILM ARTICLE
Language: English