REMEMBER THOSE ATTEMPTS AT ‘novelising’ popular, child-friendly films like Mrs. Doubtfire and the Home Alone series in the ’90s? Those cynical Olsen Twin ventures that came out in a clutch of merchandise that included a storybook version of the narrative on video – along with colouring books and matching sets of hair clips? It’s no wonder we’ve spent roughly the last century believing that the ability to translate literature into film went one way only. It’s one thing for Kurosawa to translate Shakespeare into film, but who has ever tried to write the great literary adaptation of Seven Samurai? Perhaps the resistance stems from the fact that the opposition between film and literature is false in some key ways.

In Bollywood the question has long been less relevant, given our relative lack of engagement with literary adaptation (a curious state for the leading industry of a nation that has adapted Devdas no fewer than 11 times), and what insiders will freely admit is the traditional negligence of the brass tacks of screenwriting itself. When bound scripts are still not status quo and dialogues are often hammered out on a notepad five minutes before a scene is shot, it may be a just assumption that there wouldn’t be much for anyone to print in the first place.

No wonder we are well-used to isolating aspects of our films from their whole – after all, a format punctuated with songs, set pieces and dizzying location changes makes for less organic narratives. Perhaps that’s reason in itself for us to encourage a culture of printed and bound scripts, as freely available to the public as DVDs or movie merchandising. We’ve been scrupulous about bringing out coffee-table book after book for a while now, after all, and a script would be both a collector’s item, as well as easy to read on a daily commute.

Our languages work in odd ways for us. Not everyone who watches Hindi films in India is necessarily fluent in Hindi. (Sometimes, those who make them aren’t, either.) Om Books International’s new release, the screenplay of Lage Raho Munnabhai, transliterates its Hindi into Roman script. Those are multiple filters of translation to work through for someone who may understand but not read Hindi, or someone working through the English by relying on the dialogues’ Hindi rhythms, or for anyone unfamiliar with the film’s Mumbai patois. Perhaps it would be a good look at the way Bollywood itself functions. Given how obsessed film-makers and audiences have been in recent years with self-referential looks at the art of making Hindi films, there’s every reason to expect that we would delight in seeing the ink-and-paper construction of our favourite moments even if we weren’t film students.

Cinema is, of course, a medium unto itself. It is also an art that is a composite of many arts, and self-aware of its identity. Screenwriting may be a technical undertaking, but it is also a literary format. There’s every chance that peeking into that creative scaffolding gives us new insights into the work – and perhaps, as we so often recite lines from favourite books as they are spoken on screen – we might thrill to a remembered piece of background music, a visual arrangement, the unscripted pause for breath from an actor.

To each their own, though. In a world where a constant complaint about movie adaptations is that they’re ‘incomplete’ or ‘unfaithful’ versions of the books on which they are based, how could we tolerate the staccato clip of dialogue in black and white, interspersed with the vocabulary of set and studio? It would be like following a cricket match on minute-by-minute updates; enjoyable, even poetic in itself, but fundamentally unfulfilling. And while many of us are perfectly happy to watch a film without having read the book, could we ever pick up the text of a screenplay of a film we haven’t watched, simply because it happens to be a great read?

We could try. After all, when pulp writer William Monahan (whose other credits include Ridley Scott’s more embarrassing projects) tried to adapt the imploding tensions of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, he came up with The Departed, whose heart belonged to James Joyce as much as to Hollywood. But perhaps that sense would not come home without the Scorsese understanding of the intersection of language, music and image – or without, for that matter, its great performances. Just as Infernal Affairs, without the set of Tony Leung’s jaw, might have been no more than an excellent thriller.

A book and a movie both provide two very different types of immersive experiences. Their caveat is that you have to speak their language, to understand and appreciate their core motivations. The language of a film script deserves the same understanding, to help create a third, stand-alone experience. It can, of course, also be read just to help people recreate their favourite moments from a different medium in the privacy of their own imagination. In a world that is going back to the textual experience of ideas like never before, thanks to the Internet, who knows? Maybe it could even help push a few DVDs and hair clips in the bargain.

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