Mansfield Park 2007 trailer
Alert Janeites Sylvia M. and Rosa Cotton sent us a trailer for ITV’s behind-the-scenes program; this week is featuring Lewis, but we suppose the JA Season will be featured sooner or later, as it appears in the trailer. We also found, at the same site, a trailer just for Mansfield Park. We are fairly certain that none of the dialogue highlighted is actually in the novel; interesting considering how much of the novel must have been cut to make it fit two hours.
Also we found an article about Newby Hall, where the novel was filmed.
She said: “It had the right look, the right period, the right scale of house for a baronet, beautiful grounds, delightful owners and an estate manager who helped us to organise the whole enterprise. Mercifully, we didn’t have the usual problems with telegraph poles and overhead wiring; the landscape around Newby Hall is refreshingly free of visible 21st century nuisances.”
*coughexceptbadadapterscough*
Speaking of, Jed Mercurio discusses the difficulties of adapting classic literature in The Guardian.
But marketing original drama isn’t easy. I’ve created four original series so far, and every single one felt more of a challenge to promote than to write. The audience doesn’t now the story or the characters. That’s hard to explain in a trailer or a billboard poster.
Now compare the adaptation. Frankenstein is a concept the audience understands from the title alone; the project is already “branded” without a single poster or preview. The strength of the adaptation lies in its commercial viability.
So then why is it necessary to “modernize” the stories for younger audiences? We wonder…
March 17th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
According to the behind-the-scenes clips on the web site, the entire ITV3 program is scheduled for April 1.
I’m guessing the MP trailer will be switched out for the NA trailer after Sunday, with Persuasion’s trailer the week after that.
If anybody is interested in the nuts and bolts of adaptation, Richard Krevolin’s How to Adapt Anything into a Screenplay is a useful resource. It assumes the reader already understands how to write a screenplay (as taught by Syd Field and others) and builds on that knowledge to discuss the techniques behind bringing a novel, stage play, biography, or other materials to the screen.
March 17th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
The Mansfield Park trailer can also be seen through the homepage of the Jane Austen season’s website, but the quality is not the best. Would it be possible for someone to give me Fanny’s sentence just after ” We are told to follow our hearts ” ? I can’t understand what she’s saying. Thank you !
March 17th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Sibylle- I think she says “We all have our best guides within us.”
March 17th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
That is correct, Stefanie. I tried to make out the rest, and to compare the lines with what I guessed correspond with the lines in the book. Apologies if I got a word or two wrong.
Billie… pardon… Fanny (we guys are entitled to be eraptured ourselves, you know?): We all have our best guides within us.
The book reads: We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
Next scene, Crawford: I would introduce an element of the unexpected, a vermin. (?)
Huh?
Mary: Marriage as we’ve seen it is all deceit and disappointment.
The book, methinks: …speaking from my own observation, it is a manoeuvring business. I know so many who have married in the full expectation and confidence of some one particular advantage in the connexion, or accomplishment, or good quality in the person, who have found themselves entirely deceived, and been obliged to put up with exactly the reverse. What is this but a take in? [Bold emphases mine.]
Crawford: I’m looking more likely to deceive than to be disappointed.
Huh?
Movie: two hours, plus or minus. Audiobook, unabridged, of course: 16.5 hours. Makes sense about the economy in words.
March 17th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Next scene, Crawford: I would introduce an element of the unexpected, a vermin. (?)
Vermin would be unexpected, yes, nor does one expect HC to own up to being a rat or weasel, but I think he said “of romance”.
(Although I like your “vermin” much better.)
March 17th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
You are probably right, Heather. But I’m allowing my feelings about Henry Crawford influence my auditory pathways. Here is the soundtrack of the trailer:
http://www.tlc-graphics.com/post/Tony/MPtrailer.mp3
March 17th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
After re-watching the trailer a few times, I believe that Henry C. in the scene with Mary it sounds as if he says “Are we not more likely to deceive than to be disappointed?”
The audio is a bit fuzzy, so I feel as if we are all playing a game of telephone if we try to figure out exactly what he is saying! haha
March 17th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Modernization for the younger audience…the younger audience, although they’ve heard of the work, know next to nothing about it. And we musn’t disappoint the teenagers, must we?
March 17th, 2007 at 8:45 pm
Let’s not be too hard on the teenagers…we’re not all insipid.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:12 am
All this talk about ‘re-doing it for the teenagers’ is getting annoying: not all teenagers are mindless drones and it’s unfair to suggest that they’ll all suddenly be swept up in Austen-mania if someone’s clevage is shown or if the adaptations are made all cute and fluffy and chick-flit-like. I have many friends my age who are interested in the work of Jane Austen and read her books years ago. Just because I haven’t reached the age of twenty yet doesn’t mean I know ‘next to nothing’ about my favourite books. Sorry to rant, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I just had to get that out.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I read P&P when I was 10 and saw P&P0 when I was 15. I certainly didn’t need any dumbing-down to like it. But, let’s face it — look at popular culture today versus when I first read the book in 1969/1970 and first saw an adaptation in 1974. A lot has changed, and not all of it for the better.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
I think Ina meant it generally, Bethanie and Elaine
They definitely don’t make these adaptations to please the Janeites - teenagers or otherwise.
But they are quite sure we’ll see them, just to fume and rant, and because they are supposedly adapted from her novels.
And by making them look like chic-flicks, one does get the impression they are meant for the Mills and Boons reading teenage girls.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
I am impressed, Julie. You have me beat by a year or so. But I happened to read P&P for all the wrong reasons. I do not claim to having been the typical reader during those days, but my interest then were more focused on works by the likes of Flaubert and Lawrence, and you can probably guess which books I allude to. When I saw a poster of the 1940 Pride and Prejudice I thought it would be a dark dramatic tale, and having no access to the movie, I had no other choice but to read the book—all three volumes. I was thus introduced to Jane Austen, and the rest, obviously, is history.
So I empathize with our young readers who might feel slighted by all the condescending talk about them. But the fact of the matter is that, back then, there was no access to videos or DVDs, internet, cable… Thus one great alternative to those silly shows on broadcast TV was books.
I do not claim to have walked five miles each way, every day, in a blowing snowstorm, to get to school. But it is still reality that nowadays it is so easy to be spoiled by the virtually unlimited access to these things that are available to us. I do commend the young people who do take it upon themselves to actually read these works, and to participate in discussions like these. If I were a teenager today, I don’t know if I would be playing video games and doing some other mischief rather being here right now.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Tony, I never walked 5 miles to school (in 3 feet of snow, uphill both ways), but I’ll never forget setting my alarm clock for godawful hours of the night (morning?) so I could sneak downstairs to watch A Hard Day’s Night or Help! or some other one of my favorite movies on our house’s only television - a 20-inch, black-and-white GE.
My parents (both of them) love JA and they’re the ones who got me to read the books. In the summer of 1969 my father had a business trip to England, and he took my mother, my brother and me along with him. We visited innumerable historic sites, including Winchester Cathedral (I drove Mom & Dad nuts by singing the song practically the whole time — hey, I was not quite 10 and driving Mom & Dad nuts was part of my job). The first thing we had to see was Jane Austen’s grave. Mom was almost in tears at the sight of people walking over the marker, and not paying attention to what the marker said (no brass rubbings that particular day). So I was told all about Austen and that she was a genius. I read P&P when we got home.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Julie, that is lovely. I am sure that you treasure the memories of that experience wholeheartedly. I actually envy you, but, I swear, one of these days…
To Elaina and Bethany, and the other Janeteenites here, (wow, that should be added to next year’s official words in the dictionary—we are all aware here that Janeite is in fact already in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, are we not?), know that you do us proud and that your presence and participation are most welcome.
Elaina, if you are open to another suggestion, try to avoid using the smiley. The wit in your words alone should be sufficient to convey to the reader whether you are serious or teasing, disagreeable or pleasing. If the reader misunderstands you, then you either need to study Jane some more, or they don’t deserve to be reading you at all.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
I have just watched Mansfield Park. They are all acting like actors playacting at being 18th century, and Fanny is just Doctor Who’s Rose Tyler in a dress. (I didn’t start out liking her as Rose either, but now she is my favourite Doctor Who companion.)
The grounds of Newby Hall were gorgeous, though.
At least the original 1995 P&P truly took us back in time. The actors disappeared behind their characters and did not distract us. And…there was no uncomfortable trendy camera shake. It was nicely in the middle ground between the dire, stilted 1970s BBC screenplays, and the modern overpuffed and also stilted adaptations. Literary dramas should have stuck to that quality.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
Thanks, Tony A. I actually used that smiley face so it wouldn’t seem like I was being defensive or that I was really offended, since no one can hear my tone of voice when reading my comment (which is the point of emoticoms in general, methinks).
I also realize that most people my age either a) don’t know who JA is in general or b) find her (or have just heard) that her books are horribly dull. 
Sad, I know.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
The “original 1995 P&P?”
If you must refer to a filmed version as the original, then you should know that the Beeb produced a version in 1938. That is the first recorded version of P&P. Then came 1940 (big screen), 1952 (BBC; trivia — Peter Cushing played Darcy and Prunella Scales played Lydia in this version), 1958 (BBC), 1967 (BBC; trivia — Jane Bennet is played by Polly Adams, the mother of Susannah Harker, who played Jane in the 1995 version) and then 1980 (BBC). The 1995 version is the 7th version of P&P caught on celluloid (or videotape) and the 6th produced by the Beeb.
In other words, 1995 is not even close to being the “original.” Only the book is “the original.”
March 18th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Julie, let’s refrain from misplaced snark/abruptness, shall we? Not even the squashing of evident pet peeves are worth that tone.
March 19th, 2007 at 1:36 am
My apologies to Elaina and Bethany. The two of you are not included in my reference to teenagers. I only use that word to refer to the masses of adolescents who, if not ignorant and lacking sense in fact, at least insist on pretending such. I don’t think highly of most people my own age either. And it wasn’t long ago that I was in the under 20 set. In my vocabulary, neither of you ladies would be a teenager as I do not apply the term strictly by age.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:28 am
My apologies if my tone sounded overly nasty. That wasn’t my intent. I was trying to be helpful, not snarky.
March 19th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Perfectly understandable, Julie. I felt the same way but was not bold enough to make a retort.
I find the idea of referring to what’s-his-name’s work as a benchmark truly appalling.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Julie, Not a worry. Meanwhile, I hadn’t known of the 1952 and 1967 film adaptations! I hope you realize how they’ll taunt me until I track them down. Cushing as Darcy seems an interesting choice.
March 19th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Agreed, Tony. I have yet to find something he wrote that could be considered definitive.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
Lorien, they’re not available in any home video medium. Clips from the 1967 version were briefly available to UK residents only via the Internet, but I don’t know whatever happened to that program.
There are a couple of books that might be of interest to you though. One is “Jane Austen in Hollywood.” This covers all of the theatrical releases through the 1995 S&S. A new edition came out in 2001 that will probably have Rozema’s movie. The other book is “Jane Austen on Screen.” This covers all of the adaptations over the years, including 1952, 1958 and 1967. The author was able to read some of the screenplays for the various adaptations. I have read both and highly recommend them.