2. True. Or it would be, if the notoriously conservative publishers, D.C. Thomson, who own the rights to Desperate Dan, hadn't rejected the idea when I pitched it to them.

 

3. False. The front-runner is actually the Charlie Kaufman version, about a screenwriter struggling to write a script about a writer trying to adapt The Highway Code into a movie. The action takes place inside a small suitcase that's been left on a bus.

 

Adaptation - there's a lot of it about. In fact, your chances of getting an original idea made into a film are slimmer than ever right now. Producers tend to think an idea doesn't really exist unless it's appeared before, in another form. They worry. What's the track record? Where's the heritage? What's the nostalgia demographic? If you say your idea is original, they look blank. When you try to explain what 'original' means, they accuse you of making things up. If you point out that that's what writers do, they laugh in disbelief, narrow their eyes, and surreptitiously send a message to their assistant on their BlackBerry, asking them to check what, in fact, writers really do. If you persist in trying to pitch your original idea, they press that button they've got under the table, which opens the trapdoor beneath your chair and tips you into the pool of starving piranhas, and then they snigger while stroking the fluffy white cat in their lap, with the diamond collar.

 

Conversely, nowadays literary critics often accuse authors of writing novels with an eye on the movie adaptation. "It reads more like a screenplay than a book," they sniff, "and no doubt it will be snapped up by Hollywood." And why not? Some authors have always written 'cinematically' and some of them were doing it long before the advent of cinema. It's simply visual writing. Also, many authors in the past wrote with a full awareness of the potential for adaptation. Dickens collaborated in writing stage plays based on his some of his stories. Shakespeare 'adapted' (i.e., stole) ideas from many historical and literary sources. These writers weren't precious about re-cycling material, both their own and other people's . They were working stiffs who needed to make a crust. "That's right," people say, "if Dickens were alive today, he'd probably be making a living by writing for the soaps!" Well, maybe. But I suspect that if Dickens were alive today, he'd actually be making a living by selling small, very expensive bottles of the substance that's enabled him to live for nearly two hundred years.

 

But the point is that adaptation is a creative process, or should be, and the new product can be as original, in its own way, as the source material. You don't just turn a book into a play, or a play into a film, or a collection of songs by Queen into a musical, without a lot of creativity and hard work. Except in the last example, obviously. But, in general, succesful adaptation is a process of transformation. And many of the best adaptations are the ones that take the most liberties. Especially with Shakespeare; Orson Welles tinkered with three separate plays to make 'Chimes at Midnight', a fresh story all about Falstaff. Kurosawa's 'Throne of Blood' transposes Macbeth to medieval Japan, and is a brilliant achievement in its own right. And I'm pretty sure that Shakespeare didn't write a version of 'The Tempest' which ends with a crew of camp sailors in hip-hugging bell-bottoms dancing in a circle around an octagenarian black American blues singer performing 'Stormy Weather', but that's what Derek Jarman filmed for his version, and it works a treat. Unless you're the kind of pedant who thinks that Gus Van Sant's exact shot-for-shot, colour remake of 'Psycho' was an intolerable travesty.

 

But what if you still want to pitch an original idea of your own? The answer is to find some existing source material - any old book, TV show or comic strip will do - and make it sound as if your idea is an adaptation of it. Or try a TV commercial. I can't think of any that have been adapted into films yet, but they'll be next. Personally, I'm waiting for the gritty, poignant movie version of the series of ads featuring the Oxo family. Mike Leigh sounds right to direct. Anyway, choose your source, and away you go. Don't worry, you don't have to stick too closely to the original. Just find one element that you can use. For example, if you want to make a sadistic sci-fi horror thriller, simply remind the producers that Noel's House Party was one of the most popular shows ever to appear on UK television, with its parade of grinning celebrities getting 'gunked', and then pitch your adaptation, featuring a sequence where victims get strapped down by a repulsive, smirking megalomaniac, and then die a slow, agonising death as they're drenched in toxic green slime that rots their flesh. Then write what you want. You won't have to make up the bit about the repulsive magalomaniac, at any rate.

 

As writers, we have to see which way the wind is blowing, and do our best to make the most of it. In fact, we have to adapt.