The Rosie Project: Discussions with Graeme Simsion on reverse adaptation

Abstract

Graeme Simsion’s internationally best-selling novel, The Rosie Project (2013a), began life as a romantic comedy script that nobody wanted. One year later, having ‘reverse adapted’ his screenplay into a novel, The Rosie Project (2013a) was on the New York Times best-selling list and swiftly sold to 40 territories around the world. This article, based on my discussions with screenwriter and author Graeme Simsion, and informed by my own practice-led research into ‘reverse adaptation’, will examine this little discussed manifestation of screen adaptation. What are the creative challenges facing the screenwriter in taking on the ‘opposite’ of a traditional adaptation? How do professional and industrial conditions differ for the screenwriter undertaking a reverse adaptation? Why even begin a reverse adaptation? This article also briefly contextualizes reverse adaptation as belonging to the greater contemporary ‘ecology’ of transmedia adaption, and places it in relation to the commercial novelization.

On the Role of Reviewer Expertise in Temporal Review Helpfulness Prediction

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The potential of the exegesis and the challenge of symbiosis

“…I synthesised this information and incorporated it into my exegesis as a key component of my investigation; it became a small first repository of primary data on reverse adaptation. My contextualised interview with Simsion about his reverse adaptation was also published in The Journal of Screenwriting (Murphy 2016).…”