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‘Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘Day of the Jackal’ Producers on Rewriting Literary Worlds With TV Adaptations
producers explore challenges of adaptating books handmaid's tale day of the jackal for tv
In the case of creator David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ series adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1986 legal thriller “Presumed Innocent,” which got the movie treatment in 1990 with Harrison Ford and Bonnie Bedelia as the leads, the tweaks included making the protagonist and his wife an interracial couple (Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga) and changing the climactic plot reveal. Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 political assassination thriller “ The Day of the Jackal,” which received a successful and (mostly) faithful big screen interpretation by director Fred Zinnemann in 1973, gets a more wholesale reimagining in Peacock’s new series, created by Ronan Bennett. Even after six seasons and numerous plot inventions, “The Handmaid’s Tale” managed to reassert its kinship with Atwood’s original work, such as in June’s ( Elisabeth Moss) Episode 8 opening voiceover, in which she describes how the captive female breeders in the show’s fictional totalitarian theocracy Gilead look in their uniforms, featuring language lifted directly from the novel (“some fairytale figure in a red cloak … dipped in blood”).
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