Killers of the Flower Moon: Adapting a True Life Screenplay

This week, we’re going to look at Killers of the Flower Moon, by Martin Scorcese and Eric Roth. We’re going to talk about the art of adaptation: How to adapt a book or a true life story (or in this case both) into a feature film or TV series. We’re going to look at how to develop your “take” on a book or true life story and the many hard decisions you have to make in adapting a prior work.  When you’re adapting material– whether it’s a dream, an idea, a poem, a song, a show, a board game, a haunted house, a piece of IP, a novel, a play– regardless of what you’re adapting, it’s not just a process of taking what is and translating it onto the screen. It’s actually the art of saying, What pieces of this am I going to hold on to? What decisions am I going to make around it?  As you’ll see in our script analysis of Killers of the Flower Moon, you cannot adapt the whole book. You cannot adapt the whole true story into a screenplay.  So you have to look at each part really closely. And that leads to thousands of decisions, which taken together are called your take on the material. So let’s say you’re Martin Scorsese and you find a book like Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann.  Or let’s say you are called in for a meeting with a producer who wants you to adapt something for them. They’re not just looking for you to say, “OK, this is the book and this is what we’re going to make.” They’re looking for your take. They’re looking for the you in it.  They’re looking for, How are you going to approach it and what decisions are you going to make?  And that means making really bold choices, sometimes even making choices that depart in some way from the source material, so that you can look at the aspects of the story that matter to you most deeply.  And of course, this is what Martin Scorsese and Eric Roth have done in Killers of the Flower Moon.SPOILER WARNING: There are going to be some spoilers, especially as we get deeper into the podcast transcript (I’ll warn you when we get there), but we’re going to start with a broader discussion about the book, the history, and the development of the screenplay, that will discuss some elements, but won’t ruin the movie for you… David Grann’s nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon is primarily a whodunnit. And this is the obvious take on this material.  You have this tribe of Native Americans, the Osage, and like most Native Americans, they were driven off their land to the crappiest possible place that anyone could find for them — a reservation in Oklahoma where nothing could grow. Scorcese opens Killers of the Flower Moon with a ceremony of mourning. And then, it seems, fate intervenes. Oil is found on the reservation. We see this explosion of oil out of the ground and these Native men are splattered in oil.  And even though it’s a joyful moment, it’s shot almost like blood is splattering them. It’s like a premonition. It’s a Martin Scorsese movie, we know it’s going to get dark, but at this moment, for the characters, it’s pure joy. They are dancing in celebration of the oil.  And then we are told, and this is true, the Osage people at this time became the richest people per capita in the world. In 1923 alone, the tribe made $30 million (over $500 million in today’s money.)