I was struck by a quote in one of the other threads, about the various adaptations of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The television version starred Alec Guinness, who nailed the role of George Smiley, and…
QUOTE
*Le Carré was so impressed by Guinness’s performance as Smiley that he based his characterisation of Smiley in subsequent novels on Guinness.
*UNQUOTE
You can write é by pressing alt-gr and e, at least on my keyboard. That way you can type John Le Carré fluently, like a native. One of the few good uses for the alt-gr key there. It’s a shame that alt-gr plus o equals ó, and not ö, because it pleases me more to use the letter ö than the letter ó. In fact ó freaks me out. It looks like Tintin’s face, but without any facial features. Just a blank white space. And that’s sinister. But, yes, I’m fascinated to know if there are any other interesting cases where a film or television adaptation of a source text has influenced subsequent instalments or revisions of that text.
My first thought was the James Bond novels, but as far as I know Ian Fleming completely avoided cross-pollination with the Connery films. All but one of the novels he wrote post-1962 were radically different in tone and style from the film series - they were much darker and more turgid. The exception, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was adapted for the screen almost verbatim, which meant that the resulting film was out of sync with the movie milieu (seriously - You Only Live Twice is a fun cartoon, Diamonds Are Forever is absolutely effing awful because nothing happens and it looks like a TV movie, whereas OHMSS is awesome). And even in the 1980s the new novel series was a lot more serious in tone than the Moore films. So James Bond, no. The first long-running film/novel series I can think of where both strands existed in parallel.
The oddest one-off I can think of is the case of Dr Strangelove. Peter George wrote the original novel, which was Two Hours to Doom in the UK, Red Alert in the US, and it was deadly serious. Stanley Kubrick decided to turn it into a film, and hired George to help write the screenplay, although it didn’t work out, and Kubrick eventually turned the film into a comedy. George the wrote the novelisation of Kubrick’s version of Strangelove (presumably as some kind of contractual obligation), which apparently stuck quite close to the Kubrick script, and has gone on to completely obliterate the memory of George’s original book.
(which was very different. The base captain is Brigadier General Quinten, not Ripper, and he’s not nearly as mad. He’s dying of a genuine terminal disease, presumably cancer. He hates the Russians, not because they’re perverting his bodily fluids, but because of their actions in Hungary and Eastern Europe. Buck Turgidson is called Franklin, and although the basic thrust of his character is still the same - he’s callously confident that his B52s will deal the Soviet Union a crippling blow - he’s played straight. The President knows already that the Russians have a doomsday device; he was apparently told by his predecessor, and when the Joint Chiefs recommend reinforcing the accidental attack against the Russians he uses his knowledge of the doomsday bomb to strike their plan down. The ending is slightly happier.)
No, hang on. 2010. The book of 2001 had the Discovery going off to Saturn, and Japetus. The film changed this to Jupiter, and Clarke ran with that for 2010. Logically the film of Clarke’s book of 2010 should have moved sunwards one planet again and set everything around Mars. There was the “full of stars” line, too, which was in the film of 2010 but not 2001, although everybody pretended that it was (brain explodes)