It took some good friends to Millennium as soon as it hit the theatres because it was such I good novel, I assumed that the movie would be great. Ya I know now, don’t assume. My friends tried to by polite, but I was so embarressed.
That’s not untrue. He has more “respect” for his own artistic vision than an abstract respect for another work as object. His respect is for the ideas; if he doesn’t respect the ideas promulgated by a work he doesn’t feel an overriding obligation to offer them a false respect.
Verhoeven’s movies are complex and subtle, but they’re not–to make an obvious parallel–Great Debate threads. They’re Pittings: he chooses a target and takes it to the mat. In the case of Starship Troopers, he was “pitting” Heinlein as much as he was pitting American military fascism.
as i’ve noted before, movie-makers seem to feel fewer compunctions about wholesale violation of science fiction, horror, and spy/thrilolers. Look at my above suggestions – besides the science fiction works, you have Poe and Lovecraft and Ludlum and Fleming and MacLean. why this shoyuld be, I don’t know. Maybe they feel that, as they describe “unreal” situations outside normal human experience, they can alter them with greater impunity.
(This was in response to silenus’s post.)
I seem to recall hearing that Verhoeven had never actually read Starship Troopers when he made the film. Assuming that’s true, I don’t know if you can accurately say he was “pitting” Heinlein.
Bad enough to be an MST3K episode. “You wouldn’t want to bungle or bobble the Fingle dopple!”
Oversimplifications aside, Verhoeven and his screenwriter, Edward Neumeier–the satirist who gave us Robocop–worked pretty closely on ST.
My point being, not that Verhoeven had a personal vendetta against Heinlein, but that Verhoeven did NOT in fact have “respect” for Heinlein’s ideas; he was “pitting” the kind of literature that promulgated such ideas in the first place. I might have more accurately said, more generally, that Verhoeven was indicting the source material (speaking generally; mid-century pro-military boys’ lit) as much as he was indicting the political ideas in the movie.
I’m having a flashback to the last Starship Troopers/Verhoeven thread, which if I recall aright led to a lissener-bashing and me personally bleeding from the eyes.
In an attempt to end the hijack I’ll name a couple of OTHER movies. One is the original version of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, produced in the late eighties as Manhunter; it was a confused jumble of epic proportions. The other is a counter-example, Hannibal, which is actually better than the novel it’s based on. Of course, the novel is so horrible that the only way the movie could have been worse would have been for Julianne Moore to engage in a naked catfight with Jodie Foster on screen.
Wait…that’s not actually a bad a idea. 
(We need a leering smilie.)
Okay, I agree with you on Troopers, but you’ve lost me here. Manhunter grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and compelled me to watch it when I first caught a glimpse of it on a business trip. I had to leave without seeing the rest, but I had to get hold of it as soon as possible afterwards to finally see the whole thing. It’s a powerful flick, and while there are undeveloped and unexplained bits (the whole “Tooth Fairy” thing is briefly mentioned, never fully explained (which woulda helped us understand what he did to the schmucl reporter just before he released him), then dropped without resolution, for instance), on the whole it was perfectly coherent and well developed. William Peterson’s role was wonderful (and I think he tried to recapture it with CSI), and Brian Cox was a great Hannibal Lecter. The ending dropped the book’s overdone “he isn’t really dead false ending” thing, as i discovered later, and I’m glad about that.
I can’t see it as “a confused jumble of epic proportions” by any stretch.
As for the later version Red Dragon, I think they weakened the Will Graham character and gave Hannibal too much airtime.
Hear, hear. **Little Mermaid ** is, IMHO, one of the best musicals AND best animated features ever made. Whether or not it bears any resemblance to a story of the same name (which I’ve never read, I must admit) is largely irrelevant to me.
I won’t rise to defend Tarzan or Hunchback, though.
What theme of the original I, Robot stories do you feel was captured by the movie?
In my mind, the main theme of Asimov’s robot stories was that machines manufactured with care are ultimately predictable, and when one seems to have gone off the rails, humans are misinterpreting the situation. That robots are safe because they’re made with the Three Laws, and humans are the wildcards.
This seems to imply that, as a moviegoer, you have little respect for screenwriters, and less respect for the writers whose book is being adapted. I know that your main example in this thread, Verhoeven, really takes on a lot of the screenwriter’s role for some of his movies. But what of other directors?
Do you feel every movie is improved by a good director each time he strays from the writer’s script (increasing his personal artistic input)? You imply that the best movie would have every aspect diverge from the writer’s work. Are there any screenwriters whose work is good enough that a good director should attempt to follow the script?
In my mind, a director’s artistic input comes from translating the writing into visual form. Occasionally, any written form will be problematic, and the director may need to alter it to tell the story well. But his artistic input should not be so overwhelming that the other artist’s work disappears completely.
I make no such rule; I speak in generalities.
Many great directors collaborate very closely with screenwriters. The criterion, for me, is truth of personal vision. I don’t think collaboration corrupts that. Insofar as commercial considerations, or an abstract respect for the author’s work as some kind of fetishistic thing, do corrupt the director’s personal vision, to that extent I, personally, am not likely to enjoy the movie very much. Again, generalities. If a movie works, it works; the critical response is after the fact should always be descriptive, rather than (as we seem to be attempting here) prescriptive.
Again, this smells like a “rule.” I say if the director can make great art out of an author’s raw materials, then it’s still great art; the source at some point becomes irrelevant. The Shining, Starship Troopers, The Quiet Man, THe Birds, The Godfather–all examples of (IMHO) mediocre to trite source material, made into great art by a director’s vision.
In other words, the proof is in the pudding, and all’s fair in love and art.
Opinion or not, you’ve gone too far.
Pistols at dawn! :mad:
I could NOT agree more. The book was very powerful and they wrecked it. Also, Barbra Streisand was grossly, horribly, completely wrong in her role.
You’re understating the case considerably.
It’s been years since I saw the movie, but did it even relate Luke’s death? Did it jibe with RealTom’s (=bookTom) assertion that his brother death at the hands of the army was worse for the family than the gang rape?
We read the book and saw the 1980 version in high school. As I recall, it was absolutely dreadful. Bud Cort had the lead. Poor guy.
Simon Birch was so butchered that they had to change the name, the name of all the characters, and I think John Irving sings Yankee Doodle at the top of his voice whenever the film is mentioned.
Well, yeah. The example I gave above (Out of Sight), without spoiling anything, changed the beginning, middle, & end of the movie in such ways as to be a different story, even though part of the plot survives, as do long stretches of dialogue. The two main characters, who to a great degree* are* the novel, lose their defining, well, character in the process.
And the added scenes (mostly with the Albert Brooks character) are not only completely invented for the movie, but in a different writer’s voice, & inconsistent with the Leonard characters that are thrust into them. I wish the screenwriter had just written his own movie. It might have been similar to Out of Sight in a few points, but good. As it was, apparently someone felt that they needed that crackling Elmore Leonard dialogue, but wanted entirely different (as in Hollywood conventional) themes. The final product is less an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel than a different story, with different themes & concerns, that plagiarizes the novel for the screenwriter’s own purposes.
And this is a critically acclaimed movie! At least it helped advertise Leonard’s work. That’s something.
It’s a worse artistic crime to keep the name of the movie & names of the characters, while reversing the morality of major characters, then to plagiarize 80% of the plot, but change the names, because you’re telling a different story. If Hollywood would have the integrity to do the latter, I wouldn’t mind a bit of plot-element stealing. But it consistently does the former, then excuses it because they at least pay the original creators. Economically good, artistically foul.
As a diehard Leonard fan, let me be the first to point out the “huh?” of this statement: Elmore Leonard sells pretty well on his own.
And I have to, personally, disagree with this. My phrase for the day is “All’s fair in love and art,” and by that standard I’m on Soderbergh’s side. He took a good novel (and then some), and made a great movie out of it. I say as long as your changes pay off, have at it. If you make major changes and the end results suck, then, well, don’t. But if you make changes–even the structural and systemic changes in Out of Sight–and you pull it off, then you win that round. There are no rules; each work will be judged on its own merits. Out of Sight, Soderbergh wins. A nearly flawless movie made from a pretty darn good book.