The screenplay that wasn’t filmed
Alice Walker knew precisely what the film took from her, and she said it like an editor.
Alice Walker wrote a screenplay for The Color Purple that was never filmed.
Steven Spielberg hired Menno Meyjes, a Dutch screenwriter, who turned in a first draft in three weeks and five more over the months that followed. His name is on the film. Walker’s credit reads based on the novel by.
She was there. On set, adding lines during production, teaching the actors the pacing and rhythm of the Southern Black dialect she’d grown up speaking. She wanted to make sure that when they opened their mouths, her people would recognize the cadence. She did all of that for a script she didn’t write, on a film that didn’t really want her involved.
So what did she lose, if she was there the whole time?
She answered that herself, in Our Wandering Lives: Thoughts About The Color Purple.1
“The ending of the movie of The Color Purple was disheartening to me, because I realized the editor of the film did not share my faith that family is actually like any other living organism that will forever seek missing parts of itself. ‘Mister,’ who has been so cruel to others because his father was cruel to him, is not allowed to grow, in the movie, to the full extent of his recovery. He wanders off, at the end, outcast from the family that he has harmed so deeply.”
Walker is speaking like an editor. She names the person who made the cut, and specifically names one of the main characters. She also pinpoints the exact place the character arc stops, and articulates the thread running underneath everything that the person cutting it didn’t hold. People don’t write that way about a scene they merely disliked.
That’s a developmental note. The kind I write for clients.
I read a manuscript once where the main character runs from her hometown, gets taken in by people who become a family to her, then at the end packs a bag and leaves to find her children. What I wrote back was that she leaves them almost exactly the way she left her parents and friends the first time, which was in a rush, without looking back, and it made me wonder whether she’d learned anything at all. A character who exits the same way twice is a book that hasn’t decided whether anything happened.
Same note. Mine was for a novel and hers was for a film.
When a writer loses authority over her book, the damage doesn’t stay in the paperwork. It lands on the page where readers can see it. Somebody else decides what a character is capable of becoming, and that decision gets handed to every person who watches.
This is a craft problem that started as a contract. I’m known for talking about craft. What’s happening in the industry right now is moving me to talk about the business side of it too. Spirit agrees.
Look at Tomi Adeyemi. She’s credited as co-screenwriter on the adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone, working alongside Gina Prince-Bythewood, who directed the film and co-wrote it with her.
Sidebar: yassss to Black women at the top of the call sheet and in the writing room!!
Weeks before the trailer was released, Adeyemi told her readers that if they wanted to support her, they could go buy any edition of the trilogy from a local independent children’s bookstore. Then, the day before the trailer went out, she said making the film was the worst thing she’s ever had to live through. Won’t watch it, won’t work on it again, won’t speak on it again.
She said what she said, and is standing firmly on her square.
Walker was present and uncredited and she stayed. Adeyemi was credited, surrounded by her own people and she left. Opposite arrangements with the same ending. Representation has moved a great deal in 40 years. Control didn’t move at all, cuz control was never concerned with who was in the room.
A quieter version of this happens often.
I edited a middle grade fantasy where the writer had rewritten the entire first chapter based on a note from her daughter. Two magicians who had crossed into the real world as people were now a grasshopper. The book went cute at the place it needed to go serious. I told her the original was stronger. She had never once asked whether the note served the book or whether it was simply a preference. It came from somebody she loved, so it went in unexamined.
Authority doesn’t get taken from you at a long table with lawyers. It leaves in pieces, and usually toward someone you trust. The workshop instructor you respected. The beta reader who was trying to help. The agent whose revise-and-resubmit was politely describing a different book. Your daughter.
Authority is a question you ask every time a note comes in, whether it be from an editor, another writer or a beta reader. Does this serve the book, or does it serve the person who handed it to me? You won’t always like the answer, and the answer isn’t always no. But a note you can’t defend is a note you didn’t intentionally choose.
Walker had no note to give. There was no question she could’ve asked that would’ve kept Mister whole. The film was cut, released and loved by many.
What she had left was the record, so she kept it.
She published the screenplay in 1996, in The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, alongside the journals from those years. Those journals contained the Lyme disease that was misdiagnosed for three years, the end of a long love and the full account of the period she spent working on a film she didn’t write. Reviewers called her arrogant and self-obsessed for showing that much. She kept the record anyway.
And decades later, when The Color Purple became a play, Mister was restored to the family the way the book always intended.
The character arc finished. Late… in a different medium… after the people who cut it had moved on… but finished nonetheless.
Keep the record. The feedback note you didn’t take, and why you didn’t take it. The chapter you rewrote for someone you love, and the one you refused to. The version you meant has a longer life than the version they prefer. But only if it exists somewhere outside your head.
Walker asks, at the end of that same piece, whether we might all return to sit together on the same porch.
Bring the record with you.
Àṣẹ 𓂀✧⟡
Starting August 18: Four essays on why your draft stops in the same place.
Every writer works through one element by default. It’s the reason you’re good at what you’re good at. It’s also the reason the draft stops where it always stops. One mechanism, running in two directions.
One element each over four Tuesdays. What it gives you. Where it snags. What the snag is buying you. And the one move that gets the pages going again, which you can do the same day you read it.
If you joined my session for Novel Summer Camp with ProWritingAid on July 31, this is the longer version of what we started there.