One of America's most accomplished and acclaimed living writers, E. L. Doctorow has played an active role in transforming his novels into films, writing screenplay adaptations of three works: The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake. These scripts reveal a new aspect of Doctorow's remarkable talents and offer film students and other cineastes unique insight into the complex relationship of literature and motion pictures. Each of these screenplays has undergone a different fate. Doctorow's script for Daniel was made into a feature film by director Sidney Lumet in 1983. The monumental Ragtime screenplay he wrote for director Robert Altman was to have been filmed as either a six-hour feature film or a ten-hour television series. When Altman was replaced on the project by Milos Forman, a shorter, more conventional script was commissioned from another writer. In 1981, Doctorow adapted Loon Lake, but this challenging work has yet to be filmed.