All I have, when I start an adaptation (and I don’t think this can be repeated too often, which is why I’m going to repeat it too often), is my emotional connection with the source material. If I had been offered James Kirkwood’s novel Some Kind of Hero with the proviso that, oh, yes, we’re going to keep it just as it is with one teeny-weeny change—we’re going to make the main character black so we can nab Richard Pryor—I couldn’t have done it. Kirkwood is a fine writer and Pryor is a dazzling talent, but when commercial matters dictate a total subversion of the source material, we are in, as
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