Everything Must Go

A few of us have written about movie adaptations on this blog—most recently Water For Elephants, which the office took a field trip to see last month. But, I am really intrigued when short stories get turned into movies. There are quite a few, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Brokeback Mountain, and Minority Report. Check out a whole list here. And I wonder, how does a screenwriter expand a short story into a full-length movie?

I was thinking about this because of the new movie Everything Must Go, which is based on a Raymond Carver story. After watching the trailer, it seems that there have been a lot of drastic changes from the short story. (You can read the entire Carver story here.) The writer/director, Dan Rush, has apparently added additional characters and scenes, and the main character develops deeper relationships with other people. The whole story runs about 2,100 words, so it makes sense that it would need to be expanded to work as a film. But it seems like it would be incredibly difficult to decide what to expand on without knowing the author's  intent.

I'm looking forward to seeing this one, and figuring out how the story worked as a jumping-off point. What other short story-to-film adaptations have you seen? Which ones work, and why? Which ones definitely don't?