Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

working on Hula in story form, you were interested in making
one section, "Pinks," into a one-act play.
JAMES BOSLEY (Addressing the audience.)
This was eight years ago.
LISA SHEA
And I guess I didn't encourage you because I was too afraid to
have something pulled out of a work that I was still working on,
and have attention called to it in a way that I didn't think I could
handle. I thought it would be a distraction for me, finishing the
book, to have somebody working on one piece of it.
But you know, since the book's been published, it's been done
as a dance piece at the Dance Theatre Workshop. It was called
"Hula Girl." I brought my sister with me and we sat in the front
row and we really were very moved by it. The choreographer did
a very outrageous, but I think acceptable, interpretation of the
book into a dance. It was a very wild piece. In the book, the
father is this menacing shadow figure, the mother is this dilapidated
shadow figure. They don't really move through the book as fullblooded
characters. Their presence is their pressure on the girls, so
then the focus is on the girls, as narrated by the younger sister. In
the dance piece, you have the two girls, and you have the younger
girl narrating—there are actual lines from the book that this young
girl speaks. Somehow, she combined the mother and the father
into one person, so that the mother not only protects the girls, she
also menaces them with the gun, whereas this is what the father
does in the novel. Then there is a man in this dance piece who is
sort of a walk-off part, who is actually a character in another
section of the book, but seeing him in the dance piece, you're
going to assume he's the father, and I told her if there was a
problem, that's where there was a problem. And he just stands on
the stage and smokes and sort of serves as a prop for the girls to
do some acrobatics off of.
I enjoyed it very much. I thought it was funny and accessible
as its own piece based on her reading and cobbling together
different parts of the book.
JAMES BOSLEY
I saw it with you and was wondering for people who hadn't
read the book, did they get a feeling for what the book was by
having seen it. This is something we're going through in adaptation
of the screenplay. How far away from the book can you get and
will people who see this movie get a feeling for what Hula is?
What would the audience's perception of Hula be, having seen the
dance?
LISA SHEA
It would be, you know, confused. So then you come back to
that main question: How much can the author of the original
work expect there to be a faithful translation of the work into
another medium. I don't think my expectations are pure at all for
what the filmmakers can accomplish. For instance, I think your
script is extremely faithful to the book, even though the progression
of events is completely changed, but in its way it has served some
basic impulse in the story I think very well. It's kept the focus on
the girls, to the exclusion of other parts of the book that you may
have wanted to develop.
And so now we can break it open and say, maybe something
about the discussion I had with the director about a week ago,
who got caught onto this idea of a relationship between the little
girl and one of the convicts. You know the convicts in the story—
there is a chain gang—well he saw this chain gang in the treatment
and just thought that he was very taken with this notion of "What
if one of the convicts escapes? And hides in the garage next to the
girl's house and the little girl finds him?" And, oh, maybe she
brings him some food, because she's not aware that it is a dangerous
situation.
(pause)
Well, that movie has been made. I'm sorry. It was done with
Hailey Mills and.. .uh.. .Alan Bates. It's a British movie where she
established a relationship with this convict hiding in her attic.
So talking with the director, we played the game of "what if."
"What if the convict escapes?" So what happens when this comes
up is you go around and around—that's not the advice my agent