Books vs. Movies

[automanic]

Book snobs like to groan about how Hollywood keeps screwing up their favorite novels. I avoided The Scarlet Letter like it was a repulican caucus. But LOTR and L.A. Confidential proved that even difficult, sprawling works can still be translated to the screen and keep their essence (mostly) intact.

But what about movies that surpass the books? Chuck Palanhiuk says that he prefers the movie ending of Fight Club to the original one in his book. And then of course there's Blade Runner -- I loved the novel, but the movie is obviously mind-blowing on many levels.

What are your thoughts? What movies have done better than their literary forebears, and what movies have completely fucked it up?

[Jeremy Knox]

I think it all has to do with the intent of the film VS the intent of the novel. When a novel is a sprawling epic spanning a hundred years it will be impossible to translate this onto the screen no matter how hard you try. You have to "find" the movie within the book and bring it out. Some books have no movies within them, some need major changes and some need very little. It's hard to generalize.

Jaws was a better movie than book. The Peter Benchley novel was a ho-hum distaster novel with a shark instead of a big burning building. It had unlikeable characters and was filled with cliches. The movie was so completely different that after the girl gets chomped in the first five minutes and the titles are shown the movie exhausts everything else it kept from the book except some places and character names.

The thing about books is that there are only three ways to adapt them.
One is to "find the movie" within, as I previously mentionned. This is the way most people do it.

Or, you can write a movie based on ideas, themes and scenes in the book. The end result is usually something that's very different (but still familiar to the readers) Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is an example of this.

Very rarely, for artistic reasons, you can translate the book exactly as it is onscreen. This works best with short tomes and books that have simpe storylines and plots. Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula more or less tried this (despite all the visual excesses it's almost exactly like the book) and it made for an interesting film.

It is impossible to condense the ideas of a 500 page novel into a 100 page screenplay. You're going to lose a fifth of the book at the very least. That means major characters will be cut, major scenes and a ton of dialogue.

Then there's the problem of "Is there a movie in here?" when you're reading the book. Hannibal by Thomas Harris probably had two or three movies in there and should have been adapted quite differently. It would have allowed for more sequels and a focused movie. It's a busy, meandering book and it was adapted into a busy, meandering screenplay.

I would have adapted the "Verger pays Pazzi to find Lecter" idea and then focused on the Pazzi VS Lector story for the film. Saving the Mason Verger/Clarice Sterling part for an untitled 4th film. Otherwise you'd get what happened with the current Hannibal. A mess of a movie that doesn't know who to focus on or what the hell kind of story it's telling. It's Clarice VS Krendler Vs Barney Vs Verger Vs Lecter VS Pazzi Vs...

Too much conflict right off the bat. Movies usually have two way or three way conflicts. It's all they have time for. Hannibal just throws in about twenty characters who all act like dicks to each other. You have to resolve all that shit before you can even advance the story. Movie audiences hate all that unresolved stuff. The only reason Hannibal works on any level is that Ridley Scott is an accomplished filmmaker and manages to force things forward into the finale. Otherwise this would have been D.O.A.

So in the end it all depends on the movie. Is it a seperate entity from it's novel? Can it be watched without needing the book? Does it succeed as a movie in and of itself?

Occasionally I watch movie and wish it had been a bit more like the book, but that's not because of literary snobbery. It's because the book had been very cinematic and I'm wondering why they didn't use some of the visuals more.

JK13

[The Baron]

As a bibliophile, I often find myself groaning over what Hollywood does with movies based on novels I love, not because I begrudge the filmmakers the right to take artistic license, but because they fail to capture the essence of the novel.

The film versions of Dracula are a prime example. Both of Universal's films were based on the Hamilton Deane/John L. Balderston stage play, which bore absolutely no resemblence to the novel. Hammer at least was up front when they said that their 1958 Horror of Dracula was "suggested" by the novel by Bram Stoker. Dan Curtis' made-for-tv version with Jack Palance in the title role was, well, crap. Coppola's film, while claiming to follow the book, turned it into a love story. (Anybody who has read the novel knows, it ain't no love story.) The only version I've seen that captured the essence of the novel, while playing it truly close to the literary truth, was Jess Franco's El Conde Dracula.

There's a great movie in Dracula, but the story has been adapted and done to death, so I really don't think anyone even cares anymore. Let the old boy have eternal rest.

Movies like the LotR trilogy, The Shining, and a few others, are admirable adaptations, created by truly talented people who put their all into the work. They capture the essence of the novels. When a great filmmaker comes along and shows us his/her vision... What he or she saw when they read the novel and condensed it into two to three hours... that's art. These are not works cranked out by a movie factory, and they deserve our attention. Like them or not, you can't take away anything from those who have crafted these works. I give them their props.

On the other side of the coin, I did wail and grind my teeth when I found out that Ron Howard is going into pre-production on the film version of The DaVinci Code. Dan Brown's novel is so intricate, and so detailed, I'm afraid that Opie just doesn't have what it takes to craft a proper film translation.

But that's just how I see things. I could be wrong.

[automanic]

I already mentioned L.A. Confidential in my first post, but I don't think I gave it enough attention.

This is a book that openly defied being made into a movie. James Ellroy, the author, has stated that he wrote it that way on purpose. The book spans a decade in the LAPD and includes hundreds of characters, some of whom have been continued from previous books. The thing is a beautiful, unweildy, monster of a book. When Ellroy was approached by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson to do a movie adaptation, he basically double-dog-dared them to do it, figuring the task impossible. What they came up with was a super-condesed, streamlined version of his huge novel. Although they'd edited entire characters and important albeit secondary plotlines, he was very happy with it. They'd managed to capture the mood and essence of the book, and every scene of the movie is steeped in it.

Now, I loved the entire LAPD series that Ellroy cranked out, and I wish they would make another movie from it. Granted, you'll lose a lot of the incredible detail and brutality of the printed word, but this movie proves to me above all others (sorry, Peter Jackson) that it can be done.

[Furious D]

Yo, Automanic, have you ever read Ellroy's AMERICAN TABLOID. Now that's a novel that you'd love to see a movie or miniseries made from, but you know that it would take a frikkin genius to pull it off.

To those unfamiliar with the book, it follows the lives of 3 men, two FBI agents, 1 originally honest, 1 originally corrupt, and a French Canadian ex-cop turned mob enforcer in the years leading up to the Kennedy assassination. I heard a rumour that Bruce Willis bought the rights and wanted to do a miniseries version with HBO. But nothing's happened yet.

Maybe he's waiting for Ellroy to finish the proposed trilogy before he starts work?

[mondoshane]

Bruce Willis's "Breakfast of Champions" was pretty crazy. I would have thought that itcouldn't have been turned into a decent movie but i think they did a ok job.

[automanic]

Originally posted by Furious D
Yo, Automanic, have you ever read Ellroy's AMERICAN TABLOID.

You know, that's one of those books that I bought and am still waiting for a chance to read. I'm one of those people that reads like 3 or 4 books at a time, and has even more waiting on the shelf. But now I really want to read it.

[Seedy Edgewick]

Contact surpassed its original material in many ways. Unfortunately, it fell victim to marketroids who tried to sell it as an SFX-laden action flick.

The book by Carl Sagan is dry like the Arizona desert. It reads like the synopsis of a lab experiment. However, it does contain many interesting concepts and ideas about (1) how an alien intelligence would contact us, (2) how we as a species would react to this, and (3) what kind of "mystical" science we would be exposed to in the process. There's really only one conversation between the main character and the preacher about the nature of faith. There's also in-depth discussions of the structure of the alien transmission, along with the technologies described therein.

The filmmakers took the concepts and translated them into cinematic terms. Very well, IMHO. They saw the movie within the book and constructed a thought-provoking story out of it. It really pisses me off that the flick was marketed using only the last fifteen minutes of footage. The story is about much more than the journey of a human to an alien environment. It's about the nature of humanity, our perception of ourselves and the universe we live in, and the effect of events which alter our fundamental preconceptions about existence.

I guess this is one instance in which reading the book first gives the film much more depth. The book has the luxury of long philosophical and theoretical discussions; such dialogue would turn any movie into a talky, draggy mess. The film takes the intensely intellectual nature of the original prose and translates it into visual terms that serve to entertain and (hopefully) fascinate the viewer.

I think folks should give this movie another chance. There's a lot more to it than the alien at the end.

"Waited through that whole movie to see the alien and it was her goddamned FATHER!" -- Mr. Garrison

[The Baron]

I had a similar experience with the film, The Ninth Gate. This was such a hazy movie, with characters that came out of left field, and an ending that left me asking, "what just happened?".

Then, I read the book on which it's based, El Club Dumas, and everything was cleared up. (The film and the book actually end differently.)

Too bad, really, that Polanski didn't go the extra mile with the movie. The two intertwining plots made the book so much better than the movie; with very little effort, using both plots could have created complex and interesting character conceits, and a better movie all the way around.

***SPOILER WARNING***

The girl, who in the book calls herself "Irene Adler", after a character in Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, is protecting Corso, because she has a vested interest in seeing to it that "The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows" survives: she's the living incarnation of Lucifer. What complicates matters is that she falls in love with Corso. We also find ourselves becoming very sympathetic to her (in the book.) But she doesn't want anyone who would actually open the Nine Doors to have the complete book, and makes sure of that, while helping Corso make his way through the enactment of Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

[GiGi]

Overall, making books into movies doesn't bother me. Sometimes it actually encourages me to go back and read (if I really like a movie, or there is hype ahead of time and I wonder what all the fuss is about.)

It is very difficult, Im sure, to take what people imagine in their mind (reading) and tranfer it to film. I imagine this is why there is grumblings. Some movies take great caution in making sure it matches. For instance..."Bridges of Madison County" was a book. There was contreversy before hand that the story would be different. However, it followed the book immaculatly. This is an example of a book I read to see what hte hype was about. It was overall a good story and Clint eastwood did a great job directing it. It is arguable about LOTR; some are very pleased, some are pissed about things like Gimli's and Galadrial's "thing" being left out of the original cut.

I think overall, it is a wonderful idea. People say you can't create something as good as it looks in your mind, but o'contrare. SOmetimes it's great to sit back, not think, and see someone's interpretation of something you really dig.