And Series 2 of Extras.
Cool, then.
I think it’s relevant to note that the number of writers/authors who make enough money, solely from their writing, to live comfortably is vanishingly small, and most writers likely have a day job (or a working spouse) which actually pays the bills. Similarly, the number of authors who manage to sell rights to their works to Hollywood, and are able to retain any real level of creative control over the adaptation, is also vanishingly small.
Being able to get a payday from Hollywood for selling rights to one of your works is a golden ring, that very few authors will ever be able to achieve. For those who manage it, most probably realize just how fortunate they are, and recognize that, in order to keep that going, they need to not rock the boat.
Did you ever have a friend whose child turned out to be a massive screwup? And your friend defends him and says things like, “I know Johnny went right back to shooting up the day after he got out of the rehab I paid for the last two times, but I can really see how he’s grown and changed this time!” And if you imply that you wouldn’t be comfortable letting Johnny house-sit for you because the last time you’re pretty sure he stole some of your stuff, but if you say so, they get mad? Yeah.
They may be lying to you about how they feel, or they may be lying to themselves, or they may just have a great big blind spot, but that’s still their baby and there’s absolutely no point in you trying to get them to see it your way. Defensiveness isn’t necessarily a way for them to cover up the truth; it’s a way for them to protect their illusions. Trying to break through that is just a fast way to lose friends.
Not exactly. I just understood their response as more cold-blooded than I felt their friends deserved, but then I understood via this thread that I wasn’t that sort of friend they felt comfortable opening up to in that way. Maybe their spouses or siblings are, but not me. And maybe not–maybe they’ve learned (the hard way?) that bitching about what production companies did to their work often came back to bite them on the ass, so they never bitch to anyone about this.
Now I realize that they think of me as a “professional friend” and, as such, one not to be trusted with such things. We’ve spent pleasant time together, shared meals, had frank conversations about other (mostly dead) writers, met each other’s spouses, worked on several projects together–but we’re not close personal friends. And I’m sure there are artists who rank above these guys in importance who WOULD have trashed movies they were involved with: Michael Caine’s funny, nasty remarks about JAWS: the Revenge (or whatever JAWS sequel he made), for example–Caine is too big to be hurt by dissing some project that worked out horribly.
I began this thread wondering why my friends were carrying on in public and in private about the quality of piss-poor adaptations of their work, and now I understand. Marketing 101, plain and simple. I was naive in feeling puzzled.
ETA: Oh, and I’ve also realized why my friend is so fond of the miscast British actor’s performance–he’s a big name, and the movie probably wouldn’t have been made at all if he hadn’t signed up for the part.
Of course, when King got the opportunity to write and direct his own adaptation, the result was…not great. Prose authors are not necessary the best evaluators of what makes a great adaptation.
And even authors who are able to have their stories optioned to be adapted may not get equitably paid. There is an entire underbelly of the film production industry dedicated to stripping off the serial numbers from a story concept and paying as little as possible to the creative source behind it. For every J.K. Rowling or Stephen King there are thousands of authors getting work optioned for a pittance and then having it disappear, only to see a film produced with distinctly similar ideas and themes. Douglas Adams once noted the similarities in tone between Men in Black and his Hitchhiker’s novels along with the fact that the films were produced by the same studio and team of executives with which he’d been working for years to get his novels adapted, and from which he never saw a dime other than some advance money.
Stranger
To be fair, King has since admitted that, while directing that film, he was very drunk and/or high on cocaine.
Better than Kubrick’s though. ETA: Oops, I blithely assumed you’d linked to King’s adaptation of The Shining.
Yeah Maximum Overdrive was pretty awful. But you really should see Stephen King’s The Shining. It has pacing issues but it’s a much better film than that Kubrick thing.
Barry Longyear, author of Enemy Mine spoken of it, saying “if you hear from Hollywood, call the rape crisis center.” Needless to say, he didn’t like the adaptation.
Speaking of bad adaptations, Stephen King is an interesting example because the adaptations of his works tend to fall into extremes. As a writer, he’s a skilled storyteller, though has never pretended to be anything more than that, and his books mostly have good potential for entertaining movies. Yet only a handful have really met that potential – Shawshank Redemption, The Shining (more about that below), the original Carrie, and a few others come to mind. But the majority range from mediocre to really terrible schlock like Children of the Corn, Firestarter, Graveyard Shift, and many others.
The ones that are quite good invariably are the ones with well-known competent directors. The large number of really bad ones seem like there was never really any effort made to create anything more than a cheap B-movie. It’s surprising for someone of King’s stature, because even though writers have little control over production, they certainly have the ability to be discriminating over who they sell the rights to in the first place. It seems the allure of a studio paycheck can be irresistible even to an author who’s already wealthy.
That’s not the case for a few other well-known writers, although I admit my sample here is limited. Dennis Lehane’s novels saw at least four adaptations, all of which were very good and two of which were superb, Shutter Island and Mystic River. Andre Dubus’ excellent novel House of Sand and Fog, a finalist for the national book award, resulted in an outstanding film of the same name starring Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley which was nominated for three Academy Awards. I’m sure there are lots of other examples. The quality of adaptations by writers of high stature suggests that, even though they don’t normally participate in the production, they can and do exercise discretion over who they sell the rights to. It should be noted, though, that both Lehane and Dubus are participants in the film industry in other capacities, so they presumably know the industry well.
I assume you’re referring to the 1997 TV miniseries. Directed by Mike Garris, not King (although King wrote the teleplay). I haven’t seen it but it got a lowly 6.1 rating on IMDb. Admittedly it was more true to the book than the Kubrick movie, but critics didn’t seem to think it had much more than that going for it. It did win two Primetime Emmys, but only for makeup and sound editing.
While the 1980 Kubrick film has departures from the excellent novel, I really enjoyed it as a fine work in its own right. It was rated 8.4 on IMDb, 83% critics’ consensus on RT, and 93% audience rating. Roger Ebert, who was almost never wrong about anything, gave it a perfect 4-star rating.
The one strange thing about it was technical – for some reason that I now forget, Kubrick chose to film it in a 4:3 aspect ratio. In order for theaters to present it in the accustomed widescreen format, it had to be cropped, and the same with later anamorphic widescreen DVD and Blu-ray releases.
I suspect this is the real root of your problem. You perceive this as evidence that you’re not as close as you thought you were. I’m not sure that assumption is warranted, but maybe.
Speaking from experience, when my friends became successful at writing it was suddenly a lot easier for me to find fault in them. In 2022 my part-time job became a much better paid full-time gig and it became clear that my 2.5 year old son was autistic, both happening pretty simultaneously. In the adjustment to these new circumstances, I ceased to be a Writer.
I had until that time a functioning writers group of dedicated individuals for the last eight years. We were, I thought, incredibly close. But two of those individuals, owing to the intense publicity efforts of one of them, began to have some success in writing. It wasn’t long after that they announced the writers group really wasn’t serving their interests any more because they were writing too fast for feedback and many of us weren’t submitting anything, so it wasn’t worth their time any more. We also got a nice lecture from the guy being dragged into success by his plucky friend that “writers write to publish” as if he hadn’t been going on for years about how he was going to stop writing and never publish. That just felt like insult to injury.
I honestly thought our group was about more than who happened to be writing at the time. At least it was to me. I haven’t really gotten over it. We do still get together periodically and have a nice time.
What I also noticed is that I don’t particularly care for their work when it’s written at such a fast pace. I would be loathe to write under those circumstances, which is why at least for now I’m not going to be a successful writer. I am a good writer but I am not a good salesperson.
Is all this sour grapes? Maybe? I think they are both great writers who deserve success. I don’t exactly resent my current life, but I do miss writing life and what I had with them, and I don’t know that I will ever get it back. What I do know is that I was not as important to them as I thought I was. And that sucks.
I think this is actually it. It’s a tough, tough industry and you don’t want word of you’re dissing someone’s choices to get back to them. They can shut you out so quickly and deem you a loser, so that no one else looks at your scripts. It’s a game and they are willing to play.
Say, congratulations, you’re the man and I am a wee bit envious. But serious kudos to you for getting produced. And then leave it at that. Even if they beg for more.
Yes. This is just my opinion, but the time for honesty is during the feedback and beta reading stages, not once you have a work published or adapted. There is absolutely nothing that can be done at that point so your job as a friend is to congratulate them and be happy for them, and not pester them with problems they can do nothing about.
I’m aware that it has its fans.
I’m not among them. The casting was simply awful for most of the main characters. (Danny and Halloran weren’t bad). The suspense was nowhere. It wasn’t relevant to anything. It made no sense.
Not all of King’s books were badly treated. Both Dolores Claiborne and Misery were spectacularly well-done. Shawshank, as you said, was good. I wouldn’t praise Carrie although it met a better fate than The Shining did. I wish someone would redo it and do a good job on it. I saw the remake. That sure wasn’t it.
And I hate Kubrick, generally, but really liked The Shining. Different strokes and all that.
Some people are better at compartmentalizing. They may be thinking “This godawful movie has nothing to do with my wonderful book. My book is exactly the same as it was. The producer and director and actors may feel bad over having made such a bad movie but why should I care? I didn’t make the movie.”
Does it count if they’re mainly well-known because they directed quite good Stephen King movies? (I’m thinking, of course, of Frank Darabont.)
In the unique case of Darabont, my understanding is that Rob Reiner (a co-founder of the Castle Rock production studio) was heavily involved and served as Darabont’s mentor, and also secured a significant budget for that first directorial effort. So yeah, a reasonable point – Darabont definitely qualified as “competent” but not as “well-known” at the time, but there was a bit of backstory there.
Yeah, I can relate to that, too. Either in pure neutral, “My book still exists as my book and the movie is its own and separate thing”, or as a mechanism of advertisement: “Sure, some people will never read my book and they’ll associate the movie with my title, and it’s not my stuff in the same sense. But how many people end up hearing about and then reading the book because they first heard about the movie? If that’s more people reading it than if it hadn’t ever become a movie, then the movie brought those people to the book. So it’s advertising my book, this movie”.
On the other hand… hmm… people would end up reading into my book things that actually came from the movie. They’d form shared interpretations of it from experiencing the movie, a lot of people having done so, and also from experiencing the book, but in much smaller quantities. How self-important and over-serious is it to prefer that they experience the story as written? As one’s own story?
It’s a complex tension.
Grammar nazi nipick: you want “loath” here, not “loathe”. I am loath to tell you that I loathe making that error.