Before shipping this book — the screenplay of Orson Welles’ film, The Trial — to a customer tomorrow, I wanted to make a note here on the labored story of the book’s text.

Orson Welles adapted Franz Kafka’s novel into a script and shot the film. Then, according to a note at the beginning of this book, a French publisher translated the non-dialogue portions of the script, combined that with a transcript of the dubbed dialogue from the film’s French release, and published the result. The American publisher apparently didn’t have access to the shooting script. To produce their book they untranslated the French script, transcribed the original film dialogue, and then combined the two. So the end result is a book that’s partly a translation of a translation of an adaptation of a translation of an unfinished novel, and partly a transcription of a performance of the same adaptation of the translation of the unfinished novel.

So. Hello. Welcome to the first entry on the Using Books Weblog.

The Trial is a really good movie by the way — one of Welles’ best.