Books Most Egregiously Slaughtered By Hollywood

Cafe Society
161

[QUOTE=lissener]
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.
[/QUOTE]
You think John Ford’s movie of “The Quiet Man” is less trite than the source material? Wow. I think it’s a padded mess that loses the central quietness of the title character. If John Wayne had it in him to play the Quiet Man, he didn’t show it in that movie. :shudder:

162

[QUOTE=foolsguinea]
You think John Ford’s movie of “The Quiet Man” is less trite than the source material? Wow. I think it’s a padded mess that loses the central quietness of the title character. If John Wayne had it in him to play the Quiet Man, he didn’t show it in that movie. :shudder:
[/QUOTE]

I think he took a quaint little trifle and gave it a Shakespearean depth and scope. YMMV.

163

[QUOTE=lissener]
I think he took a quaint little trifle and gave it a Shakespearean depth and scope. YMMV.
[/QUOTE]

I mean, is Romeo and Juliet trite? Is All’s Well That Ends Well? I suppose, to some degree. Is triteness the defining character of either of those works? I don’t really think so. Neither is the triteness of The Quiet Man, which is largely due to the iconic nature the film itself achieved, IMO.

Again, all of this is so extremely subjective, even for CS.

164

[QUOTE=lissener]
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.
[/QUOTE]
:eek:

OK, in the interest of maintaining spoilers, I will refrain from debating the entirety of Out of Sight–book & film. But the changes to this story were Disney-level, except that they used Leonard’s dialogue to make their movie sound better. There was a pretty good movie idea about the relationship between Clooney’s “Jack Foley” & Brooks’s “Richard Ripley,” but that was not, not, not an adaptation of Leonard’s book. It was another story entirely, less well-written, which had Leonard’s dialogue grafted onto it, like a hapless anime cyborg, to make the final product of the movie sound sharper & hipper than it was. And Karen Sisco’s moral arc in the movie is different–generically Hollywood, in fact.

I can understand someone who’d never read the source material liking the flick, but having read the book first, & seeing the movie soon after, I was really disappointed in Soderbergh. They really “Hollywooded it up.” The sad thing is if you’ve ever seen a book you liked turned into a US movie, you already know what I mean by that.

165

I’ve read everything Elmore Leonard has ever written; most of it at least twice; some of it three and four times.

I liked the movie better than the book.

YMMV.

166

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
And, just once, I’d like to see a version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court that even approximates Twain. You can even cut out Twain’s comments on the power of the Catholic Church. Just give me a version that retains Twain’s story and wit. Even PBS bollixed this one up.
[/QUOTE]
Hear. There are approximately a gajillion versions of this, the vast majority of which sucks audibly. I saw one where Whoopi Goldberg was the time traveller, and she brought a laptop with her. A laptop in Arthurian times! How cool! and what does she do with it? She uses it one (1) time, to… wait for it… predict a solar eclipse so everyone will think she has magical powers. I mean, come on!
[QUOTE=simster]
The Neverending Story by Micheal Ende… wonderful book… movie completely screwed it up… and then they had to make sequels (and a cartoon?) that did it even worse.
[/QUOTE]
Huh. I loved the living shit out of that movie as a kid, and when I finally read the book a couple of years later I loved it too. What was wrong with the movie?

My own contribution: In the Name of the Father. I saw the movie and then read the book, realizing that virtually nothing had been kept from the book. Doubly disgusting, as it was based on a true story and there was barely a true word in the movie. “People with these names spent time in prison for a crime they didn’t commit” was what survived.

167

[QUOTE=Saltire]
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.
[/QUOTE]

A theme that was contained in the movie. The robot’s/evil computer are predictable, which is why Will Smith distrusts them. Indeed he is able to deduce purely from the three laws why they are rebeling, showing that they are simply coming to the logical, if unintended, concequences of thier programming. This theme is recurrent in much of Asimov’s work in I robot and many of his other stories, that the logical and well determined rules laid out at the beginning of the story lead to unpredicted conflicts which the protaganist is eventually able to discover via logical deduction.

Granted a lot of the other themes in the movie differ from the stories. But I haven’t read most of the stories in years and the theme that has stuck in my memory most sharply over time is the one descibed above. So to me, anyway, the movie stayed faithful to the book in the most important sense, even if it differed in many particulars.

168

Alice in Wonderland is a book that has never been successfully done as a movie. That’s actually the fault of the book – there’s very little to hang a story on. They did an all-star version a few years ago that was tolerable (as a frame tale, Alice has to memorize Jabberwocky), but all of the rest failed miserably.

169

[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
East of Eden. Oh, god. Oh, god.
[/QUOTE]
Since I also wrote about East of Eden, may I ask what you meant by your remarks? “Oh, god” it was so good, or “Oh, god” it was so bad?

Just curious. Could you elaborate?

170

[QUOTE=Miller]
I haven’t read the book, but I rather like the movie. I don’t really think it would have been feasible to have a movie in which you can’t see the protagonist at all. Movies being a visible medium, the audience is going to need to be able to see the character to relate to them. If you can’t see them at all, it’s going to be almost impossible for the audience to establish any sort of a connection with them. If he’s standing in a room and overhears a conversation important to the plot, how do you convey his reaction to the audience? Voice over can only get you so far.

Plus, if the audience can’t see the character, how are they supposed to know what the character is doing to avoid detection. If you have a scene where a character is supposed to contort himself or move acrobatically to avoid touching someone or knocking something over, how do you convey this to the audience if they can’t see the character? Especially if the plot calls for him to be successful? Letting the audience see the invisible character while the other characters remain oblivious is the only way to visually convey that first point in your list: that he still has physical presence. Rather than “mess up the point” of the book, this seems like the only possible way to make it in the first place.
[/QUOTE]

You know, I don’t disagreee with anything you have written. I guess this is one of those books that just doesn’t lend itself to a cinematic adaptation.

171

[QUOTE=Priceguy]
Huh. I loved the living shit out of that movie as a kid, and when I finally read the book a couple of years later I loved it too. What was wrong with the movie?

[/QUOTE]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with loving them both…and it’s been a long time since I read teh book… but I read the book first.

IIRC… The movie ended with the boy (atreyu) riding the dragon and ‘chasing’ the boys that bullied him… basically becoming a bully himself.

The book ended with him overcoming the reasons he was picked on… he didn’t chase the boys down and make them hide via the dragon. Also, in the book, riding the dragon was a special thing allowed for special, noble pourposes.

IMHO, this changed the overall moral of the story… the rest was passable… but watching the movie after having read the book I was left with a “WTF, did they even understand the story?” feeling… this type of change was clearly made with the intent of making the story likeable to children “look mommy, he gets to make the bullies afraid, I can do that too” instead of what the author intended.

And it’s been nigh on 20 years since I read that book… still got my first edition… I remember the day it hit the store… I probably should read it again.

172

It also occurs to me that more people are capable of enjoying both the movie and the book (regaurdless of the differences between) if they see the movie first and then read the book… I think that for many people, reading then seeing sets up for lots of disapointment as very few movies have the time or budget to put in the level of detail that an author (or one’s own imagination) can.

This is why I am so very glad that every attempt at making a movie of any of Zelazny’s greater works (Amber, Dilvish, etc…) have failed…

I would like to see what they could do, as a TV series potentially, of Stasheefs Wizard series… I think that could lend itself to a good deal of fun.

173

[QUOTE=simster]
IIRC… The movie ended with the boy (atreyu) riding the dragon and ‘chasing’ the boys that bullied him… basically becoming a bully himself.
[/QUOTE]

I was working in a theater while in high school when this came out, so I only saw it by bits and pieces… but wasn’t the boy reading the book named Bastian? ISTR that the boy in Neverending Storyland was Atreyu.

Other than that, what I most recall of that movie is that the point when the Wolf-thing opens its eyes in its dark lair, and growls, almost every child in the theater would start crying and howling. A minute later, they and their moms would be milling around in the lobby, trying to calm them down – usually by bribing them with candy. (not a good plan, BTW)

I’d’ve thought, that if you’re adapting a children’s book into a movie for children, not scaring them out of their wits and out of the theater altogether would be a sign of success. So I could see where Neverending Story would flunk the “good adaptation” test.

174

Without a shadow of a doubt, the worst movie adaptation I have ever seen is Ghost Story, in which Peter Straub’s superlative masterpiece of horror is stripped, gutted, flayed and left dangling in the wind.
They changed the whole concept of the novel by changing the ancient, malevolent entity at its heart into a mere ghost. Straub must have been mortified to see what they’d done to his book. But, as they say, I guess he cried all the way to the bank.

175

The Thin Red Line by James Jones was such a wonderful book, so rich in characters and development, and written so that the various maneuvers could be understood and followed. The movie was probably okay if you had never read the book, but sadly lacking if you had.

176

[QUOTE=ambushed]
Since I also wrote about East of Eden, may I ask what you meant by your remarks? “Oh, god” it was so good, or “Oh, god” it was so bad?

Just curious. Could you elaborate?
[/QUOTE]

You missed the rest of my quote. East of Eden reminded me of the Ann Rice book whose title I couldn’t recall. EXIT to Eden. Which, uh, wasn’t great, but it turned from a bondage soft core porn book into some kind of caper about cops and Rosie O’Donnell, neither of whom were in the original book.

177

[QUOTE=Umbriel2]
I have something of a soft spot for Disney’s version though, for the sheer delight I felt when I realized that they’d stolen their happy ending from The Call of Cthulhu.
[/QUOTE]
Seriously?

178

I’m bumping this thread, because I thought of a couple of good ones: Carlito’s Way and After Hours (the book on which the movie “Carlito’s Way” is based).

The movie Carlito’s Way is decent, but it paints a very different portrait of Carlito from the book version. In the movie, Carlito genuinely wants to go straight with his restaurant. He wants to escape the barrio and settle down after having played it the right way in his life. When Kleinfeld, his close personal friend kills the mobster he’s supposed to spring from prison, along with the mobster’s son, Carlito is shocked, and this provides the turning point in the movie as he tries to break from Kleinfeld’s influence.

The book version of Carlito is much harder. He is unrepentant and stays away from the drug business more out of lack of opportunity and fear of getting caught than any real character change. Come to think of it, he doesn’t even stay out of the drug business entirely–He does small jobs as a messenger boy to curry favor and get money from the old gangs.

When Kleinfeld does what he does, Carlito is surprised but takes it in stride. Nothing really changes between him and Kleinfeld (whom Carlito neither likes nor trusts from the outset. They weren’t really friends in the books, and Carlito despises Kleinfeld’s lack of skill as a lawyer.).

Carlito does run a restaurant in the book, but it’s nothing nearly as classy as what the movie depicts. It’s a dive in a lousy section of town, and Carlito worries about losing it because of all the shootings and violence that happen on the property.

For all of that, I really liked the movie in it’s own right. I thought it was decently made, and I really cared about Carlito, despite the fact that his character was way too good to be true. Actually, in a few places, the movie did a better job than the book, which was kind of clunky and had problems of its own.

The prequel to Carlito’s Way, Carlito’s Way: Rise to Power, on the other hand, blew chunks. Based on Edwin Torres’ first book in the series, it took a wrenching account of Carlito’s fight to win control of the drug trade–which wasn’t so much of a rise to power as it was one clusterfuck after another right into prison–and turned it into a story of a harebrained scam against the mafia, which in real life would not have fooled the Italians for a second. Then, to top it off, it shows us a happy ending which doesn’t jibe with the beginning of the first movie.

Carlito, once again, is shown as a loyal stand-up guy in the movie, while in the book he kills a good friend in prison on orders from his new bosses.

179

[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
You missed the rest of my quote. East of Eden reminded me of the Ann Rice book whose title I couldn’t recall. EXIT to Eden. Which, uh, wasn’t great, but it turned from a bondage soft core porn book into some kind of caper about cops and Rosie O’Donnell, neither of whom were in the original book.
[/QUOTE]

Yeah, I agree the book wasn’t great, in fact, I didn’t like it at all (I generally don’t like Anne Rice’s stuff). I thought turning it into a comedy and playing up the resort were great ideas. I think the real problem is that the writer, director, producer and cast were squicked by the B&D themes inherent in the book, too squicked to joke effectively about them. With the B&D themes so disquieting to the movie’s creators that they couldn’t handle them, the movie didn’t have anywhere to go, so that’s where it went. Nowhere.

180

If you like Lovecraft, “Dagon” is a pretty durned good B-movie adaptation of “The Innsmouth Horror.” It plays fast and loose with the story in many ways, but it retains the creepy, creeping horror of the original story.