Adapting Literature for Hollywood: Breakfast at Tiffany's
Films made under the societal, industrial and cultural conventions of Classic Hollywood Cinema generally conform to the closed-ended narrative structure and reinforce certain central methods of moral and social controls. Shinning stars, defined gender roles and happy endings are part of the social contract between the filmmakers of the classic Hollywood picture and the expectations of the audience. The adaptation of Truman Capote’s wistful and melancholy BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S presented mid-century Hollywood with many challenges to their strict society-reinforcing conventions. Perhaps the most obvious bow to these pressures was the invention and conversion of Paul Varjack from un-named narrator to the leading man/love interest characterized by George Pepard and by the reordering of the film’s narrative away from the novella’s 1st person memoir with a discontinuous timeline and ambiguous ending to a fairly conventional Hollywood romantic comedy with a 3 act structure culminating with a ...