Emilio Fernández and John Steinbeck met in 1941. The writer told him the story about the fisherman and his pearl, which happened in La Paz, Baja California, and Fernández asked him to write a script, but the novelist would be busy for several years before deciding on this project. Why would a renowned American writer, with ascendancy over the world of Hollywood, look for a Mexican director to offer him a story that was not yet written? Reyes Bercini, without leaving the theoretical landscapes of semiotics, rhetoric and poetics, leads us to discover the tensions and results of the transposition between literature and cinema, through the punctual and particular analysis of La perla.