State of Play

FOR BRITISH TVPHILES, the news that Paul Abbot's excellent 2003 miniseries State of Play was being remade for American audiences came as a bit of a puzzler, mostly because it was being condensed in a two hour movie, and it was hard to imagine how that could work.

Having rewatched State of Play again recently on DVD I can tell you that it shares a flaw with more recent vintage short run series like Jekyl: it starts like gangbusters and kind of peters out at the end. So that, plus this article, gives me new hope that maybe the movie won't be so bad. Plus, hey...Helen Mirren.

Much harder was shrinking the story to two hours. Mr. Hauptman and Matthew Michael Carnahan, the film’s original writer (whose credits include “The Kingdom” and “Lions for Lambs”), mapped out the entire series and then began eliminating things that didn’t seem essential. They were encouraged by Paul Abbott, creator of the BBC’s “State of Play,” who told them the amount of new information added over the six hours wasn’t as much as they thought. “In some ways the series is just a great piece of six-hour tap dancing,” Mr. Macdonald said.

But Mr. Carnahan’s script was still very long, and when Mr. Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) came on board, he hired two new writers, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, to simplify it.

Entire characters were dropped, like a brash young journalist with father-son issues, played by James McAvoy in the original. “That was gut-wrenching,” Mr. Hauptman said. And one of the last things to go was an affair between Cal McAffrey, the lead journalist and a friend of the accused member of Parliament, and the M.P.’s wife. It was probably the single strongest story line in the original, because of the way it moved some of the story’s larger themes into the bedroom. But in two hours, Mr. Macdonald said, there wasn’t room for it to be a believable relationship, so it became part of the back story instead, something that had happened in the past.

Eric Fellner, of Working Title Films, which co-produced the movie, also insisted that the resolution at the end be clearer. “You can have all sort of loose ends in a six-hour series that you can’t have in a movie,” he said. “Television and movies are ultimately very different. In TV it’s the beginning that counts. With movies it’s the last 15 minutes or so.”