Novel to Hollywood to Broadway?
What’s wrong with this path, it and some variants so often followed? The answer: It depends…and mostly in hindsight after the story becomes ancient history. No one can deny that The Lion King’s Broadway version was (and still is!) a marvelous experience. The music was there even in the original classic Disney cartoon version, but those theatrical costumes and antiphonal drums at the beginning of the Broadway version put me on the edge of my seat, something no film version could ever accomplish! I can make similar comments about West Side Story.
Of course, that’s cheating on my part: Novels weren’t involved in either Broadway show I mentioned. So let’s consider Water for Elephants, which went through all three stages but had limited success on Broadway. The movie version was damn good, but the Sara Gruen 2006 novel that began that sequence of differing media versions was better. I have to admit that I only saw the movie, but the majority of pundits claimed it followed the novel well. And you could tell; I’d claim, as I often do, the movie was good because Hollywood’s screenwriters didn’t tamper with the novel’s theme, plot, characters, and settings that much. (Maybe the Broadway show had limited success because it’s hard to put a circus on a Broadway stage? The producer(s) should have paid attention to The Lion King, which managed to put all of Africa on the stage.)
Unfortunately, rabid book-banners attacked the novel, so I suspect that Hollywood tried to PG the movie and the Broadway producers neutered it as well. It was absurd for censors to go after even the novel, of course, especially considering that their attempts at preserving tweens and teens’ innocence are almost always futile: Today’s young adults know a lot more about grown-up things than older adults can even imagine and aren’t prudishly embarrassed to discuss them either. Hell, call me precocious if you want, but I was reading books like Tom Jones and Fanny Hill back in the day before my physicist colleagues ever imagined the internet! And I never minded talking about such things. I’m not a pervert (like an infamous political figure who shall remain anonymous here…akin to Voldemort, although Rawling’s villain didn’t lie as much!).
Book-banning bumpkins aside, a successful novel-movie-Broadway show triple play is hard to pull off. I can’t remember if Disney tried to CGI The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling, author), but some steps in that triple play, even with CGI and no matter the order, often fail. But if the movie or play is based on a novel, there’s more chance for it to succeed…unless the producers don’t follow the novel! Let’s face it: Novel to screenplay or Broadway show makes a lot of sense. The novelist has already done a lot of the work! Okay, some of it isn’t usable—neither movie nor Broadway show is good at internal dialogue, for example—and the three medias are vastly different. But theme, plot, characterization, settings, and direct dialogue are common to all three, and a good novel handles those masterfully (emphasis on “good,” of course).
Hooray for novels!
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Rogue Planet. The fantasy classic Game of Thrones will probably never make it to a Broadway stage. Neither will my “Game of Thrones”-like romantic hard sci-fi thriller Rogue Planet, although it would be easier to stage (no magic and no dragons, similar swashbuckling action). My principal character is a bit of a rogue himself, the legal heir to a throne on a planet taken over by an evil theocracy (modelled after Iran, of course). Readers who like fantasy will like this one as much as hard sci-fi addicts do. (There are some bows to Isaac Asimov that you sci-fi fans will enjoy!) Available wherever fine sci-fi stories are sold…in both ebook and trade paperback formats! Enjoy!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
