I’m showing my first hour American Lit class the 1966 movie of Fahrenheit 451 right now, and I’m fairly dissatisfied with it. With current technology, I think a much more faithful adaptation could be made now. The 1966 version just omits some really cool things from the novel, like the Mechanical Hound and the destruction of the city that could be kept in a modern version using CGI.
They’re working on it:
In the meantime, there’s a good graphic novel of it that just came out:
I hope no one does - certainly no one who cares about CGI. Truffaut’s movie, and Bradbury’s work in general, isn’t about gizmos and technology. It has been decades since I’ve read the book and seen the movie, but the last scene, in the forest, still resonates. That is the heart of the movie, which wasn’t about the future, but about the present.
I’m not on IMDBPro, so I can’t see much. Who is doing it? I hope not anyone who would make a travesty of the story.
That’s why it should be remade. In the right hands, which is the big worry, it can speak to today’s audiences. The book/movie is more timely now, and possibly the near future, than it was even then, thanks to this disgusting new breed of right-wingers we have now, and the apathy of the general public who might let them back into power. I love the old movie and the book, but a new one, in the right hands (worry) could start a new dialogue.
Maybe they’ll like the movie well enough, they’ll order the book for their Kindle. 
Any new movie would obviously have to rework the theme to take into account the modern wealth of written material besides books and newspapers. Truffaut’s movie could just get away with it in 1966–when it was still plausible to believe that burning books alone could eradicate the ideas they contain.
To my mind, a remake that starts with the premise that all possible written material is outlawed–basically a world without reading and writing–would be dismissed by modern audiences as too outlandish even for SciFi. A smart producer would instead assume a future where whole classes of writing is banned–say, all fiction or speculative writing–and that a draconian government monitors all “licensed” libraries and uses extensive SW to constantly delete such writing from the Internet. Newspapers or their electronic equivalent would exist as disseminators of clear fact only–or at least that small class of verifiable facts allowed by the government. And the Firemen would then function more like a counter-terrorism arm of law-enforcement, where the “terrorists” are those who share Bibles, old novels and philosophic works in an off-the-grid underground.
The key IMO would be to give Captain Beatty a larger role as Guy’s antagonist–something Truffaut hinted at in the scene with the library but (as I recall) never really developed.
The idea in the book is clearly that books are ideas, not the physical book.
Right, but the Mechanical Hound is simply terrifying in the book. Its absence was immediately remarked upon negatively by my students. The technology wasn’t there in 1966 to do the Hound well; now it could be included and be just as cold and menacing as it is in the book.
Although I liked the way the original film has spoken credits, to suggest what it would be like to watch a movie in that world, at some point the idea of completely eliminating the written word, or even the ideas they represent, cannot work in any kind of organized society. There are trains, cars, buses, and probably airplanes. There are electrical systems, the whole TV-entertainment infrastructure, and the medics who come to pump Ms. Montag’s stomach after she overdoses. All these things require the written word in one form or another; nobody can learn to design and maintain all these things without some sort of literature behind it. OK, well, so we just ban fiction; but then, the Mechanical Hound works by “smelling” binding glue, paper, and ink–how is it going to differentiate between technical manuals and Charles Dickens?
I think the point of the novel is just to explore the ramifications of a culture which, in 1950, was only just beginning to veer away from the written word to audiovisual entertainment, at least in terms of the daily ubiquity of television.
Honestly, the Hound seemed like the hokiest and most unnecessary part of the book. Of course, that could be because I always imagined it looking something like this: http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/199905/99-046/aibo.gif
They’ve tried many times, but the scripts keep getting burned.
This is essentially the story as it is in the book: Bradbury explicitly says that ‘safe’ reading material is available and that safe, “non-combustible” facts are widespread knowledge (like, for example, how much corn Iowa produced last year) with the government’s approval. The idea was that these facts kept the people happy and thinking that they were informed, giving them no need to rebel.
You’re correct that it would not work, however, but not for the reason you think: Some large number of people thrive on controversy, even to the point of inventing it when it doesn’t really exist, because being contrary makes them feel powerful. These are the people who are certain vaccines cause AIDS and Bush did 9/11 and believe wholeheartedly in the existence of chemtrails, Illuminati Zionists in Rome, and secret brainwashing signals in HDTV. Bradbury touches on the theme of dissent but not these people, who would be the sane dissenter’s worst enemy: Associating with him, spewing insanity alongside his reasonable concerns, and forever tainting his cause by association with their lunacy. Alan Moore understands this kind of thing much better.
Kindle, get it?
Actually, Kindles were involved in a scandal recently in which users found works by Orwell (appropriately enough) had been remotely deleted from their devices. Although the move was motivated by copyright concerns rather than censorship, Amazon has promised not to do that anymore, but the capability still exists.
This. It’s a fine line to tread. You have to accept ever present and intense censorship in a world where it is becoming easier and easier to transmit information discretely. The surveillance necessary for such a society would mandate a constant ability to monitor computer use of citizens. As in, you can’t do anything without being online, or your activities being monitored for future review. If this wasn’t the case, what’s from stopping people from copying the entirety of the Gutenberg project on a flashdrive and giving it to all of their friends? In other words, what’s the temperature at which ICs burn?
There are lots of ways to get around this, though. Say that there are surveillance things in place that would monitor your computer, and that all flash drives are issued by the govt and are only capable of saving image files on the drive or any text based files that are sent out by the government itself. You could show people trying to work around this (smuggled paper books that someone takes pictures of to get the text in an image) and see how they’d fail against the firemen, etc.
Is it anything like Equlibrium?
I view Idiocracy as a sort of modern successor to 451.
Re-read the part where Beatty is talking to Montag when Beatty visits Montag at home. The government isn’t what drove the book banning, people were. First they were all lulled into apathy with their electronic entertainment. Constant noise that keeps them from thinking, giving them no attention span to speak of (sound familiar). Then in an attempt to make people feel better book banning started with banning books that minorities were uncomfortable with, “Little Black Sambo” for example (question is it the “right wing” that tries to ban ideas because they are offensive to a minority group? No.). Then eventually all books are banned (with the exception of manuals, comic books etc.) by the government but it’s all in response to people. It’s not top down, it’s bottom up.
That’s all that would be necessary for complete repressive control of a population. Make it so that no device is sold (and no component parts available) that doesn’t instantly connect wirelessly to the government-run wifi. So you can’t read books on your ereader, and saving books to flashdrives, etc., would be pointless. You could never read them. All usage would be monitored.*
Then put in place a strict limit on what a person can post in a day; violations would shut down the device (which is keyed to your biometrics. This is a society with Total ID). This would prevent ideas from being shared.
Say…a limit of…140 characters.
*and recorded. They could build a big e-records-holding facility in, say, Utah. Sure, I know that sounds wildly sci-fi and tin-foil-hat, but…oh, wait.