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Michele Diniz


Abstract

Although film and literary scholars have done extensive research on the field of film adaptation over decades, the emergence of digital media, and consequently media studies, sheds a new light on the topic, distancing itself from the issue of fidelity to source and authorship to encompass the changes in narrative theory in dealing with writing for transmedia storytelling. In this research report, more than proposing a reflection on these changes, I call attention to the role of screenwriting in the contemporary creative process, with a focus on the cross-media screenplay as a fundamental intermedium to the conception of the transmedial storyworld. In order to illustrate the point, I look at the 2019 Netflix series Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings not as case of transmedial screenplay, as such an example is still hard to come across, but to demonstrate the transmedial potential of the contemporary adapted screenplay, especially when the original story has not been transposed from a novel, but from a medium that is not traditionally diegetic, in this case music.