Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake

At first glance, movie remakes-new versions of old movies-may seem no different from other film adaptations of earlier material. But the peculiar nature of the relationships they establish with their earlier models and with their audience makes them unique among Hollywood films, and indeed among all the different kinds of narrative. Short stories and novels are often adapted for stage or screen; ballets are sometimes recreated or rechoreographed; comic strips are occasionally revived by new artists; plays are reinterpreted by each new set of performers; but only movies are remade. Hollywood does not have a logical monopoly on remakes, since a given short story, for instance, can inspire two or more dramatic adaptations, but the movies' voracious appetite for material has produced a series of twice-told tales utterly characteristic of Hollywood, with no close analogue in or outside the movies. Only remakes are remakes. The uniqueness of the film remake, a movie based on another movie, or competing with another movie based on the same property, is indicated by the word property. Every film adaptation is defined by its legally sanctioned use of material from an earlier model, whose adaptation rights the producers have customarily purchased. Adaptation rights are something the producers of the original work are held to have a right to sell, with the understanding that either their sale will not impair the economic potential of the original property (a film-rights sale may actually increase the number of copies of a novel printed and sold) or that the price of purchasing adaptation rights reflects the probable loss of the original property's appeal (as in the case of musicals, whose runs are normally killed by the appearance of a film version). But of all the different types of adaptations, only remakes compete directly and without legal or economic compensation with other versions of the same property. It is clear that remakes necessarily entail adaptation to a new medium, for a remake in the same medium would risk charges of plagiarism. How could a lyric poem be remade by another poet? Either the effect of particular words and images would have to be sacrificed, in which case the remake would be so loose as to be unrecognizable, or the new poem would have to follow its model so closely as to be actionable.1 But adaptations to a new medium do not encounter these problems because of a legal distinction between the original work itself and its status as property. Once Warner Brothers had acquired the adaptation rights to The Maltese Falcon, they were entitled to borrow anything they liked from the novel-characters, settings, scenes, even dialogue, in addition to the plot-on the theory that the rights to this material were properly disposable as subsidiary rights, though not to be identified with the novel itself. Even such a close adaptation as John Huston's 1941 film, Warners' third adaptation of the novel, was clearly distinct from the novel, a distinction clear to anyone who could tell the difference between a book and a movie. But remakes differ from other adaptations to a new medium because of the triangular relationship they establish among themselves, the original film they remake, and the property on which both films are based. The nature of this triangle is most clearly indicated by the fact that the producers of a remake typically pay no adaptation fees to the makers of the original film, but rather purchase adaptation rights from the authors of the property on which that film was based, even though the remake is competing much more directly with the original film-especially in these days of video, when the original film and the remake are often found side by side on the shelves of rental outlets-than with the story or play or novel on which it is based. Although we might describe any story as parasitic on its models, remakes are parasitic on their original films in a uniquely legalistic way. Since a successful remake supersedes its original for all but a marginal audience watching it for its historical values, remakes typically threaten the economic viability of their originals without compensating the producers of the original in any way. …