Women Adapting: Bringing Three Serials of the Roaring Twenties to Stage and Screen

When most of us hear the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, we think of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell’s iconic film performance. Few, however, are aware that the movie was based on Anita Loos’s 1925 comic novel by the same name. What does it mean, Women Adapting asks, to translate a Jazz Age blockbuster from book to film or stage? What adjustments are necessary and what, if anything, is lost?

Bethany Wood examines three well-known stories that debuted as women’s magazine serials—Gentlemen P...