When I heard they were doing a movie about this book, I figured it would be a documentary because, well, the book is a non-fiction study of how the food industry in the U.S. developed. It also delves into the root causes of the obesity epidemic.
Now I find that it is a fictionalized story starring Greg Kinnear, Patricia Arquette, Avril Lavigne(!), Bruce Willis, Kris Kristofferson. . . and a whole host of others.
Can someone explain to me how this actually works?
I’m flabbergasted. Next will be a fictionalized movie of Guns, Germs and Steel starring Angela Landsbury and Russell Crowe. A Brief History of Time with Bob Newhart and Courtney Love.
I don’t really know what kind of narrative they’re going to put on this. I know it’s directed by Richard Linklater, so I’m a little intrigued just for that reason. I’ve seen the trailer but it didn’t really give any sense of the story (if there is one). My sense is that it’s a bunch of loosely connected vignettes (ala Slacker) centering around various aspects of the fast food industry.
Woody Allen did Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex and were afraid to ask. Henry Gurley Brown’s book Sex and the Single Girl was filmed twice as fiction. The Longest Day and many other nonfiction war books were turned into fictional movies.
Get some real movie buffs in here and they’ll be able to come up with a dozen more examples in a minute. It’s an old Hollywood practice. All you need for a movie is a title and a theme, nothing more.
Actually, I think an excellent movie could be made of the themes in GG&S. Especially done in the style of Twilight Zone: The Movie – a series of shorts – if some way could be found to tie it all together towards the end.
The sense I got from the trailer is that it’ll be something like Traffic - following a group of characters who don’t seem to be connected, but are, through the fast food industry.
When I wrote that I just pulled two unlikely people outta my butt but since then I’ve been thinking. . .
The movie starts out with Angela slogging through pre-historic Europe in deerskins when she stumbles upon a field that looks remarkably like Maximus’ hallucinatory Heaven. She does a grunting, pre-historic dance of joy as she realizes that her wandering days of hunting and gathering are now behind her.
Out of nowhere comes a charging Russell Crowe all dolled up in his spiky leather skirt and Fuller brush helmet. He pulls out his sword to smite Angela but before he can, she drops dead in front of him, covered in oozing pustules from the smallpox she contracted.
Jared Diamond pops up between the rows of wheat and says, “I TOLD ya so!”
The end.
This reminds me of “Fever Pitch”. Nick Hornby wrote an autobiography centred on his fanatical obsession with the Arsenal football (soccer) team throughout his life. Elements of this were wrapped into a romantic comedy called “Fever Pitch” starring Colin Farrell. It was then remade in the US as a Red Sox-themed romantic comedy starring Jimmy Fallon. So by its final iteration, Nick Hornby’s autobiography is now unrecognizable and the pun on “pitch” (ie soccer field) is sadly lost.
Or it has been adapted to refer to a baseball pitch. Still works, kinda.