Moonfleet, a childhood favourite of mine, totally ruined by a film version.
Exactly the movie I came in to mention.
I Robot has nothing in comon with the book except the title and the concept of the Laws of Robotics (a concept which the movie then proceeds to rape).
Instinct was the end result of something that started out as an adaptation of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael but became unrecognizable.
The James Dean version of East of Eden is based on only a small portion of the novel and drops some of the key aspects even of that portion.
Gone With the Wind movie version dropped two of Scarlett’s children and two very important secondary characters, Suellen’s husband and Archie, not to mention the very colorful Tara neighbors.
Also, in the book, Ashley, Frank, et al were members of the KKK, but considering the glamorized whitewash Margaret Mitchell gave it in the book, it’s not hard to see why that was completely glossed over in the movie after Scarlett was attacked.
Also, how Scarlett’s father died was handled differently. I guess the studio wasn’t prepared to go into the subtleties that were in the book.
Logan’s Run has a couple of scenes where events and dialogue are copied nearly verbatim. But most of the movie was drastically different from the book. The book would have been unfilmable in the late 1970s, at least on any budget the studios would have approved. Today, with CGI, you could probably do it. Although you would still have to re-write it, to avoid accusations of kiddie porn.
do u mean that the studio was afraid of being sued, or that the lawyers didn’t like their job being portrayed as evil?
Simon Birch/Prayer for Owen Meany gets my vote.
Among the best adaptations - To Kill a Mockingbird, the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (of course, they had SIX hours to adapt a 200 page book - its pretty easy to be faithful when you don’t need to make hard choices about cutting material.)
I don’t know what actually happened, but it looked as if the lawyers got hold of it and said “I don’t like the way we’re being portrayed. Let;'s fix this.” So they tacked on the wimped-out ending, and Tom Cruide doesn’t have to go slumming in low-rent Panhandle motels in order to hide from the Mob.
I’m not saying that this is what really happened. Certainly I don’t think the studios were afraid of being sued. (By who?) But the huge change simply cries out for a rational explanation.
Thanks, now I got new ideas for books to read. I mean I can understand small rewrites in order to save time, after all most movies are 90 minutes or so it’s easier to combine certain characters than introduce them.
But some rewrites are just wrong, like when they take two characters in the book who hate each other and make them friends
I just read “Make Room! Make Room!” by Harry Harrison, the 1966 novel on which the film Soylent Green was based.
In the book, there isn’t any Soylent Green, nor indeed anything made of people. There are countless other small differences, but that’s pretty much the biggest.
thwartme
I agree that Phiilip K Dick probably deserves his own category both because his books are so radically changed (except for perhaps A Scanner Darkly which used animation to portray the mind bending nature of his story) and also because so many movies keep being made and many of them do fairly well.
Lawnmower Man of course resembles the original in no way other than the title. They didn’t change the title so they could try and attach Stephen King’s name to it.
I’m not sure if I would count movies that are made from short stories or novellas - there’s no way to adapt those without making large changes unless you are going to make it a short film. Of course I suppose you could then also say that long or complicated novels by their nature can’t fit into a feature length time period. Maybe we should stick to changes in the nature of the plot, and not changes made solely do to extend or contract the original text.
Stephen King’s book “Different Seasons” had the two novellas that were adapted into the movies “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me.” Both were excellent.
I’ve often argued that it would be best to use short stories or novellas, as that would give you the scope to expand on the actions and not have to rush through a lot of exposition. Unfortunately, when they do this in the movies too often they rush through anyway, and need filler – that’s what happened in Mimic and Total Recall and The Space Frame. But The Day the cEarth Stood Still statrted as a short story, and made a great film. I’d love to see Fredric Brown’s “Arena” done properly as a feature-length film. It CAN be done.
Make Room, Make Room, made into Soylent Green. Huge changes in the very nature of the story, although I’d say it’s for the better- the book just peters out.
I’d also like to make brief mention of The Kite Runner. There are only two changes from the book that I noticed, and they’re both ‘minor’ scenes. However, one of the two was a part of the book that literally made me scream in despair- I knew what was coming several pages in advance, and it was the psychological equivalent of being caught on a train tracks and watching the train barreling down on you. I was very surprised that it did not end up in the movie. The part I’m speaking of is towards the end where
The boy attempts to commit suicide.
Totally non-present in the film, I expect to make it more of a ‘happy’ ending.
Oh I agree that short stories can be made into decent or excellent films. As the previous poster mentioned, Stand by Me and Shawshank turned out quite well. My point is just about the OP - whether it turns out horrible or excellent, the short story or long novel is obviously going to have to have major changes just for the purposes of length. For that reason I think we should stick to the more interesting issue of major changes made for other reasons.
I read OM over a decade ago, probably 2-3 times, loved it & would love to see a movie (perhaps an HBO miniseries) of it.
I liked SB. I still think an OM movie is possible if someone really wanted to do it. However, if it were that easy to make, it would have been done instead of SB. SB was only done after several failed attempts to translate OM to screenplay form.
While not perfect adaptations, a low budged European version with the US title “Terror of Frankenstein” is pretty close, as were the TNT Patrick Bergman-Randy Quaid, the Coppola-Branaugh-DeNiro, and the Hallmark Alec Newman-Luke Goss versions.
As for Dracula, the three closest attempts were the BBC Louis Jourdan version, Coppola’s, and (alas) the Jess Franco-Chris Lee mess.
That’s what I was going to say. I read the short story but I never saw Lawnmower Man.
Since THE FIRM (faithful for 2/3 and then completely different) and FORREST GUMP (name only resemblance) have been mentioned I’ll go with Cider House Rules. It’s not quite as drastic as the Birch/Meany rewrite, but almost: it condenses events that happened over the course of 50 years in the book into about 5 years and, imo, guts the book in the process.
I was reading an article on the making of THE GODFATHER. The original plan was to make a low budget ($2 million- piddly even for the early '70s) adaptation set in [what was then] modern day. In the tradition of “no Civil War picture ever made a dime”, execs thought it would flop as a big budget picture. When Evans agreed to go $6.5 million for a period piece most thought he was insane. (For those who don’t know, The Godfather wasn’t just a hit but was the highest grossing picture of all time for several years; I can’t remember if it was Jaws or Star Wars that first displaced it.
They’re hardly the BIGGEST rewrites, but I’d like to mention the inexcusably-execrable-given-the-great-source material Prince of Tides movie and the remarkably-watchable-given-the-horrible-source-material Hannibal.
In the former case, though the plot is mostly unchanged, the difference in emphasis is horrifying. Streisand’s ego and need to be assured that she’s pretty transformed a sweeping family drama with a romantic subplot into the reverse. (And she wasn’t pretty enough to be Lowenstein, anywhistle.)
In the latter case, the director and screenwriter evidently had a meeting where they discussed the ending of the book, decided that it was so incredibly stupid and offensive that one could only assume it was written not by the Thomas Harris who wrote Silence of the Lambs but rather by his antimatter counterpart, and decided to chuck the original ending for one that would not make the viewers’ eyes bleed with rage.