Producing : Trying to adapt my novel, what should i do first? by Damian Forest Light

I've adapted a couple of books, and what I do first is copy and paste the dialogue into final draft ( or whatever you use). I make my scene headings and maybe one sentence per scene. Once I've done that, then I go back and fill in the action with as few words as possible... Not an easy task for an author. After I've done that, I go back and crop or delete unnecessary dialogue. It takes about 4 or 5 rewrites before I let someone else read it.

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You would not present a book to a production team, by the way, you would present it to a producer who would still likely ask you to put it in script format first.

Tack down the central conflict for the protagonist, the basic story spine, and look for characters that can be combined into one person to reduce the number of actors needed.

Exactly as Deanne noted - really be prepared to cut away anything that whilst it works for the novel, doesn't drive the adaptation and the central story forward.

copy and paste the text into a word file and cut out anything that does not look like a movie