Well to hijack into a discussion of the novel, although the narrator is Quartermain, the three main characters are very much a trio, so that focusing on Quartermain as the main protagonist of the story is an oversimplification.
Quartermain says he’s been an elephant hunter for twenty years, and has a grown son back in Britain i.e., he’s in his middle 40s. He describes himself as not particularly tall and on the skinny side, but very wirey and fit from a life of physical activity. He’s the “wise old mentor” of the group.
Sir Henry Curtis is the most heroic of the three. He’s a rich, propertied member of the aristocracy. Handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, blond and muscular. Definitely the “muscle” of the party, as well as the person who’s quest is the reason for the entire adventure.
Captain Good is the comic relief of the trio. He affects a monocle and impractically formal attire and grooming. His weight varies from “portly” to “disgracefully fat” at different times. He was dismissed from the Royal Navy with “the barren honor of a commander’s rank”, presumably having spent his career as a lowly lieutenant and failing to make promotion. He is also a wretched shot, and has a marked tendency to become enamored of women at the drop of a hat. Having by chance been interrupted in the process of shaving and mending his clothing, in order to maintain appearances he has to spend much of his time in Kukuanaland without his pants and clean shaven on one side and bearded on the other.
So you have the trio of the Brain, the Brawn, and the Buffoon. Like I said, I can’t believe this hasn’t been done as written.
I actually knew some of the people involved in this story. What pissed me off about the movie adaptation was that it dropped some things that make the story more compelling. I’m fine with them ignoring Nash’s little problem with the law in the '50s, and I’m kind of okay about the fake government conspiracy bit, but in real life Alicia divorced him, and then let him back in her house when he needed her, which to my mind was far more interesting than her tolerating him as his wife. The real Alicia Nash is far more interesting than the movie one. They also didn’t show the awe Nash was held in even before he recovered. A good biopic should find the unique parts of a story; most distort the story into a normal movie narrative arc. That’s why the Dewey Cox movie worked so well as satire.
I think normal adaptations have the same problem - changing a unique piece of fiction into a script that has the right climaxes at the right page numbers and which has standard love interests. I Robot is a typically dreadful example.
Forget the adaptation issue - thousands of years from now, when some poor grad student is doing his dissertation on this “movie” phenomenon that was all the rage for 700 years, he will cite this as the worst movie ever made.
> I watched the movie because Jennifer Connely was in it…and I love numbers.
And this is why film makers can get away with wild distortions in adapting real life stories or fictional stories. They know that there are lots of film viewers who simply don’t care about fidelity. They want to see their favorite movie star, regardless of how ridiculous the plot is. They want to see lip service paid to their favorite topics, even if the topics are handled superficially. They’re just fine with movies that throw away the plot of the novel whose title the movie uses. They’re just fine with movies that superficially mention the topic of the movie (in this case the life of a mathematician), even though any mention of that topic in the movie (in this case any mention of mathematics) has no relationship to reality.
I’m trying to say what I think **Wendell **is saying: producers are so blatently disrespectful of John Nash’s actual story, and they catch mostly negative press for pretending that it conveys the actual historical events, and so few people come in to the theater because of the events’ truth, so why don’t they just change “John Nash” to “Joe Mash” and say the film was “inspired by” rather “based on” Nash’s life? That way, they’re not claiming a thing that is misrepresentative, and they still get 99% of the virtues of claiming that the film is in any way accurate.
Because people like to pretend that they are interested in real-life stories. They want to think that they care about the fact that the story is true. They like to listen to the hype that the movie makers put out about how the film is based on a real incident. They listen to news stories about the film right up to the point that someone points out the inaccuracies in the plot, and then they just tune out anything further said. People like to lie to themselves. They want to believe that real life fits the movie cliches that they’ve been absorbing all their lives. They like wildly distorted real-life stories because they want to believe that real life is like the absurd cliches that they’ve been seeing in movies all their lives.
I, to this day, still scratch my head at The Lawnmower Man. I mean, even without the passing resemblance, most book-to-movie adaptions are similar in theme. In the OP, at least both were set in a jungle atmosphere and involved treasure.
For this film disaster, they took a short story based on a satyr-owned lawnmower service that has a lawnmower run by magic and turned it into a combination cyber-horror and Flowers for Algernon combination that was utter crap. In fact, you know it was crap because it was a Stephen King story that spawned only one sequel.
Actually, it appears that the people making the movie about the Holocaust apple story, which turned out to be fabricated, are going to make it anyway and call it fiction. I suspect most of the people seeing it will think it real. I didn’t read if they are going to change any names.
Too bad there weren’t a lot of numbers in it. BTW, her makeup at the end of the movie, during the Nobel ceremony, made her look reasonably like the real Alicia. She didn’t sound a bit like her, though.
I’m not an expert but I think they buy the rights so they can use the characters names legally and disregard the original story. I doubt they are worried about mis-representing the original work for two reasons; 1) Most movie-goers will not have read the source material and 2) movies and books are two very different mediums. I think most people understand that and don’t expect movies to closely follow the book these days. IMO, movies are more of a commercial venture than literature.
In that case, “Based on Original Characters By (Author)” would be fine, IMHO. Again, that’s an indication “We took the main characters and the setting from the story, and nothing else”.
True, as you say, not everyone will have read the source material, but movies-from-books do rather intend to inspire people to read the books, and they’re going to be disappointed or conflicted when the two aren’t even close…