Why movies are failing you…
OK, maybe they’re not. You might be in love with those “original screenplays” featuring gratuitous but steamy sex, car chases, main characters (MCs) hanging from helicopters, and so forth. You’re an audiovisual person who puts aural and visual stimulation over everything else. Maybe a person addicted to video games and YouTube videos? Lots of gunshots, bomb blasts, and marching zombies going off to war? Why in the hell are you reading this article then?
For the rest of us (presumably the majority of the readers of this blog), you like a bit more meat in your Hollywood diet. You expect a movie to take a carefully crafted story from a book and add the audio and visual components. You’ll still have to add the odors of bodies in sexual heat, blood from dismembered bodies, and bowel and bladder cadaveric releases mentally (I just did a pretty good job of that, right?)—at least until Hollywood figures out how to add an odortrack to complement the soundtrack.
The story from the book pays more attention to plot, settings, characters, and dialogue than any “original screenplay”—and that’s the problem. That screenplay is an outline for the director to follow, no more. If it comes from a carefully crafted book, that director has another tool to use, a source that will fill in details the screenwriter cannot hope to include in her or his screenplay. That additional step, if done well, can make a great movie out of a great book. In some cases it can make a good movie out of a terrible book or a terrible movie out of a great book. But that screenplay step is fraught with danger. Yet not having a carefully crafted story available sends a movie to the plate with already two strikes against it.
Let’s go way back to High Noon. Here Carl Foreman, the screenplay writer, expanded upon John Cunningham’s short story, “The Tin Star” (the film is associated with some of that same anti-communist fervor that forced Charlie Chaplin to flee the country and made political careers for Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan—sometimes you just have to speak bad about the dead). I can’t imagine that plot going beyond a short story, but Mr. Foreman made it so. The film now sets in The National Film Registry in the Library of Congress (I could find no Chaplin movies in the list, though).
Another Film Registry movie is The Shawshank Redemption. Frank Drabond’s screenplay built upon Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawhank Redemption” (yes, THAT Stephen King). It wasn’t a great box office hit and didn’t win a lot of critics’ praise, but it’s now considered one of the best movies of all times. And it features my favorite actor, Morgan Freeman (Tim Robbins isn’t too shabby either). I never heard of the King story before, but there it is; and it was ready for the director to use.
These are two examples of movies being better than the written originals (I’ll give more later). Another and better King story, probably his best, Misery, is an example of both a great book and a great movie. I don’t know why the movie didn’t get more acclaim beyond Kathy Bates’s Academy Award—maybe because it all took place in the ex-nurse’s house and features none of the gimmicks mentioned in the first paragraph? It’s now a Broadway Play. It’s enough to keep any crime writer looking over her or his shoulder—or eschewing road trips to Mr. Sanders’s adopted state!
Here’s a sleeper that has stuck in my mind: In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan do a masterful job of translating John Le Carré’s psychological, hard-boiled, and noir masterpiece to the silver screen. This was a faithful translation that worked well. Not so faithful was Hampton Fancher and David People’s Blade Runner, the screen version of Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but that movie is the best sci-fi movie ever made, and up-to-date too, if you’re paying attention to that post-apocalyptic bandwagon so popular right now (Dick probably has more stories turned into movies than any other writer).
And if you want an extreme case of successful novels turned into successful movies, consider the Bourne movies based on Ludlum’s trilogy. Those original trilogy books, all bearing the same titles as the movies, were a bit ponderous and outdated although still excellent—the screenplays changed them but without losing plot, characters, settings and other things that make books great, while adding every movie junkie’s favorites—probably the best car chase ever filmed and other heart-pounding visuals and sound, while making Matt Damon a household name.
Movies made from books tend to make actors’ careers a lot. Morgan Freeman in Shawshank, Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, Matt Damon as Bourne, and so forth. They also make directors, who, after all, are active participants in translating a good book to the silver screen. Probably the most famous case of the latter was Gene Roddenberry. OK, the original Star Trek wasn’t a movie, and he was also producer and screenwriter as much as director, but that original series, with episodes based on many sci-fi writers’ stories, spawned an entire enterprise (pardon the pun). Roddenberry admitted that the concept was based on A. E. Van Vogt’s Space Beagle series of books. Sorry, Trekkies!
I’ll cite one recent example where the movie was a lot better than the book. The Martian, for the most part a plodding treatise about a stranded astronaut turned potato farmer on Mars, was turned into a really good sci-fi movie. And I’ll even give an example of a great movie not taken from a book. Alien is probably the second best sci-fi movie ever made—one scene, hackneyed now by repetition, will forever stick in my mind. Directed by Ridley Scott (he also directed #l1, Blade Runner), who puts J. J. Abrams to shame, this is a quiet tour de force, sci-fi noir and horror at its best—maybe because the screenwriters wrote a real story first to base their screenplay on?
You can probably come up with numerous examples where you liked the book and liked or didn’t like the movie. The translation of Child’s Jack Reacher and Asimov’s I, Robot to the silver screen were egregious examples of movies not doing justice to the original books—Will Smith saved the latter; Tom Cruise destroyed the former. But please, comment to this post and add to the list. Maybe that will wake Hollywood up. With so many good books written by so many good authors out there, Hollywood should limit their use of screenwriters to turning good books into film. A successful film based on an “original screenplay”? It happens, but it’s rare!
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