‘From Scratch’: This Is Why the Book Was Adapted Into a TV Show, Not a Movie
Netflix’s From Scratch centers on follows Amahle “Amy” Wheeler (Zoe Saldaña), a Black American woman who puts her law school career on pause to move to Italy and study art. Though she’s there to find herself, Amy finds herself falling for a Sicilian chef named Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea).
The series is based on a memoir, but there is a reason it was made into a TV show and not a movie.
‘From Scratch’ is based on a true story
Fans falling in love with the limited series should know that From Scratch is based on a true story. Adapted from Tembi Locke’s memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, the series chronicles Locke’s time in Italy and falling in love with her late husband, Rosario “Saro” Gullo, before he died from cancer.
“About 20% of it is hardcore fact,” showrunner Attica Locke told Tudum. “Some places in our series — down to where things are placed on the set and where people are standing — are exact mirror images of what actually happened.”
This is why the book was adapted into a show, not a movie
From Scratch could have easily been translated into a two-hour film. However, the Locke sisters and Hello Sunshine, the production company that helped bring the story to the screen, knew that the story deserved more than that.
“I will credit Hello Sunshine for this, always,” Attica Locke told The Hollywood Reporter.” They had the vision of this being a series and not a movie. I think we had a kind of knee-jerk love of film, but they were like, “There’s too much here. It’s too good to try to do in two hours.”
For Tembi, it was about seeing the characters well beyond the “meet cute.”
“In some ways, our series is about what happens after the rom-com,” she explained. “It’s not what happens after the “meet cute.” In a film, you don’t get to follow your characters the fifth year into their marriage, or once they’ve had the baby. A part of our series is about love growing up. Evolving beyond just romantic love.”
The timeline in ‘From Scratch’ was very important
In addition to having the space and time for Amy and Lino’s relationship to play out, the Locke sisters were also adamant that the series didn’t jump back and forth in time. They wanted their audience to watch the couple’s love unfold, so that they would be deeply invested by the time Lino’s health declined.
Tembi Locke wanted the audience to experience her life as she experienced it. “We knew we needed to tell it in a linear fashion, not mosaic,” Tembi told Shadow and Act. “That was one of the first decisions we made because we felt that if we were going to ask the audience to go into deep grief, to go into hard places, we didn’t want them to get lost in time and space by switching up.”
Clearly, the strategy to stick to a linear series worked well.
