Don't change Stevenson just for the fun of rewriting him. You can kill a
classic with "improvements." A big, sprawling novel, say Bleak House, you
have to pare down to a continuity that will hold an audience for ninety or
a hundred minutes. But remember, Jekyll and Hyde already has a continuity.
We don't have to waste time hammering out a story line. What you have to do
is visualize it, think of every scene as the camera will see it and not as
you--or Stevenson--would describe it in prose.
-- B. P. Schulberg (to his son Budd)
