Rachel Maddux

"Revealing and entertaining ... a virtual how-to-do-it handbook for would-be Hollywood producers." -BATON ROUGE SUNDAY ADVOCATE "Absorbing... the process of transferring a story into script and into film is interestingly presented in this collaboration." —BIRMINGHAM NEWS "An interesting and different book... may well be the most unified and useful contribution which the movie A WALK IN THE SPRING RAIN will make to the history of the cinema." -KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL FICTION INTO FILM is a unique study of the making of a major motion picture—from original story to screenplay to finished film. It consists of (1) a short novel, A WALK IN THE SPRING RAIN; (2) the screenplay adapted from it; and (3) a commentary which discusses in detail the actual making of the film, from inception to completed product. Although the book describes production terms and such technical details as scoring, editing and looping, it is primarily concerned with the problems and techniques of transforming a work from one medium into another, of adapting a literary property into a cinematic one.

The author, who was Guest of Honor at the Deep South Con in Knoxville in 1969, told us that it came to her as music, and that she was compelled to write it - she said that if she had not had a typewriter, she would have scratched it on one rock with another. And that the original manuscript was about twice the size of the published text - she cut it herself because the publisher insisted. I have read the book four times - it is very like good music, in that while the sequence is logical, a description of the events would be useless. There are no monsters or villains, and the only supernatural element is access to the Green Kingdom itself. There is no "utopia" in the politico-economic sense, and the small cast of characters have little interest in politics.