Atrael has a thread about the lack of success adapting sci-fi stories to the big screen. It seems to me the problem is bigger than that. I’ve seen very few movies that even came close to succeeding in telling the same story as the book. Do the Teeming Millions have any examples of notable successes or egregious failures?
I suspect we’ll find more flops than hits, since that’s true of movies in general, regardless of their source. But there are certainly some that stand out.
On the failure side a couple of examples that come to mind for me are “The Scarlet Letter” with Demi Moore. This is one of my favorite novels. I have never even seen the movie, but the previews made it obvious we were going to see a lot more of Miss Moore’s interpretation of Hester Prynne than Nathaniel Hawthorne ever dreamed possible.
Another is “The Great Gatsby” with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (and a young Sam Waterson). It’s not one of my favorite books but I happened to have read it just before I saw the movie. The movie was true to the book in the details but, IMO, missed the big picture by a mile.
Any others?
“Cheddar?”
“We don’t get much call for that around here, Sir.”
*Shawshank Redemption
Stand by Me
The Shining
Misery
*
(I’ve read Green Mile but haven’t seen it yet)
My two favorite Stephen King books were made into movies I loathed:
*The Stand
It
The Godfather* was both an excellent book and movie. (I read the book after seeing the movie, and I wish the movie had shown more about Johnny Fontaine’s character)
The film version of “The Green Mile” is remarkably true to its literary form. IIRC, so are “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me” (yes, I read a lot of Stephen King).
My husband tells me that the film “Starship Troopers” is nothing like the book, and I can personally vouch that, although “Gone With the Wind” is one of my favorite movies, it skips over a lot of things that are to be found in the book. Scarlett’s two oldest children come to mind. . .
“There are more things you don’t know than there are things that I do know. I despair of the imbalance.” – Dr. Morgenes, The Dragonbone Chair
CATCH-22 always leaves me confused aesthetically…It’s one of my favorite novels, and the movie ain’t NEAR as good as the book, but I LOVE the movie anyway.
Something about that casting, I guess…my god, a movie with Alan Arkin, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles…how could anyone NOT love it?
Joe Queenan has advanced the theory that good novels contain a lot of character development and interior dialogue, things that are virtually impossible to transfer to what is, after all, a very visual medium, so that good novels make bad movies. Bad novels, OTOH, are driven primarily by plot, so that bad novels make good movies.
There is also the consideration that print is a much “denser” medium than film. To take Dune as an example, early in the movie whole chunks of dialogue are lifted straight from the novel, but, it seems to me, about three-quarters of the way through the movie, Lynch realized that he was only a quarter of the way through the book, and either had to wrap it up regardless of the damage that it did to the story, or go down in filmic history as the man who learned how to shoot from Michael Cimino.
And, of course, there is also the presumed feeling of the producers that, “What the @#$%&*, we’ve bought the rights to a popular work, let’s jack up the title and run a different story under it, and, by the time the moviegoers realize that, it’ll be too late for them to get their seven bucks back”.
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Just to play devil’s advocate here, I’d like to mention a movie that was not only as good as its novel, but was even an improvement on it.
Bladerunner which is based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This is particularly true of the director’s cut that doesn’t have that feel-good tag ending with the Harrison Ford voice over.
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I think that movies convert best to books when the people involve don’t try and stick to faithfully to the original. They are very different mediums, and if you try and “preserve” everything you are going to end up unsatisfied. On the other hand, if you sit down and decide what in the book needs to be distilled out and reformatted for this very different medium, you can come up with something that preserves the spirit of the original. It is the same thing as translating between two launguages. Most of the time the literal translation of a poem will be stodgy and boring; this is why good translation is as much an art as writting itself–how does one retain the sounds of words, the meter, and the meaning all at once? And more importantly, how does one decide what to cut so that the core is preserved?
What really bugs me is the way popular writers such as Crichton so obviously write the book with the movie already in mind. Sometimes it is like they’ve already picked out the leading actors, and shaped the charecters to fit.
On The Princess Bride–just wanted to mention that the novel and the screenplay were both written by William Goldman, one of the biggest screenwriters in Hollywood for the last three decades, and an acomplished writer. I think this is why the conversion worked so well–as an expert in both fields, he knew how to display the same elments in both written and cinematic mediums.
Mrs. Pluto is a big James Bond fan. (She actually goes to Bond movies without even checking who the Bond girls are first!) She says she tried to read one of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels once and it was dry and boring. So maybe bad books do make good movies.
I agree that they are two different mediums and what succeeds in one isn’t likely to succeed in the other. I wonder, though, if that point is so obvious to us amateurs, why is it so elusive to the professionals?
Hey, I’m still waiting for a definitive screen version of Dracula. If y’all haven’t read the book, read it, and you will see that no movie has yet fully captured the dark magic of that story. I had high hopes for Coppola’s version, but it was a huge disappointment. (And Bela Lugosi? Don’t make me laugh. That version was good, for its time, but we could do much better now.)
“Kiss The Girls” by James Patterson, the book was excellent, the movie was horrible. Not even the same ending.
Anyone remember the “Shogun” miniseries with Richard Chamberlain. The book and movie were pretty close, and both were good, the book was three books actually.
“A Time to Kill” by Grisham. The movie followed the book somewhat. But of course the book had much more detail. The same goes for “The Firm” with Tom Cruise in it. Movie and book were both good.
I’ve learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it.
The difficulty of translating a book into a movie is that there’s always much more in a book than in a movie. In order to keep the movie to a reasonable length, you have to start cutting, and that takes a certainly amount of skill. Further, since movies are more visual than books, the visual aspects are emphasized.
A few examples of good books into good movies:
McTeague into Greed (though, of course, the uncut version is better than what was released)
A Boy and His Dog
The Maltese Falcon (Bogart version)
Neighbors (though I think you had to have read the book to understand the movie at all).
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
One of my favorite movies is Gone With the Wind. I love the movie but don’t particularly care for the book. In the book she has 3 children (one with Charles, one with Frank, and one with Rhett) while in the movie she only has one with Rhett. The book was quite a bit different.
Also, I like the book Little Women but didn’t care at all for the movies (old and new version). Just didn’t work for me.
An interesting bit about the movie based on John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker.” A close friend got to see an industry pre-edit screening. I’d told him I was excited because it was one of my favorite Grisham books because there was so much humor in it, and he agreed that the film he saw was really good. When the final movie came out, his roommate that he’d seen the first cut with saw the theater release and said that nearly all the humor was cut out and it was just another boring movie. While I didn’t think the theater release was that bad, I wonder how much better it must have been before someone had the bright idea to make it conform to the usual Grisham cookie-cutter film.
Also, my vote for the best movie from a horrible book: Forrest Gump. (The book is pure garbage.)
The recent King adaptations are all very good. I don’t know how anyone who’s read “The Shining” or “Christine” can bear to watch the movies. (For example, in “Christine” you can see in your mind the car coming to life and having characteristics…in the movie, like the antenna goes up and down menacingly or something…oooh! Scary!)
On the subject of Stephen King: until recently, with Shawshank and Green Mile, most movies made from King books were pretty bad.
There was one oft-forgotten exception, though: The Dead Zone. Truly good movie, from one of King’s more mediocre books.
And, hey, how about Psycho? Bloch wrote the story before the movie, right?
On the subject of really bad movies from great books, I have to nominate anything with H. P. Lovecraft’s name on it. Pretty universally, movies that attempt to adapt Lovecraft stories are just the pits. It’s a colossal shame; Lovecraft was extremely gifted. If you saw Re-Animator and thought it was fair or even terrible, you need to read the original story. Blood-chilling.
Max’s post brings up an interesting point…How often is our judgment of a movie based on what we as the readers have mentally pictured? I’m sure we all do it…when reading a novel, you’ll mentally picture the characters faces, and voice…as well as the pronunciation of their names. So when we go to see the movie, and those images don’t match what we’ve already decided is right, we’re disappointed. Would it be better to see the movie, and possibly enjoy it for its own merits before you read the book?..Or read the book to understand the story, then go see the movie.
One of my favorite books, possibly top 3 of all time–East of Eden, by Steinbeck.
The movie has James Dean, Burl Ives, and some forgettable others. Possibly the most insulting adaptation of any novel I’ve read/movie I’ve seen. I can’t put into words how bad it is.
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The best movie adaptation of all time has to be To Kill a Mockingbird. It is perfectly cast, and follows the tone and narrative of the book religiously. Great movie.
I also agree with kknick34 aboutThe World According to Garp. Everything in the movie was exactly as I had pictured it after reading the book.
Finally, John Carpenter’s The Thing is a very nice adaptation of the short story “Who Goes There?” True to the original story line, and verrrrry creepy.
Absolute worst movie ever made form a book? Lawnmower Man by Stephen King. It is a short story about a Pan type character who actually eats grass and then the owner of the lawn (that is a pretty shit summary, but it will work for these purposes).
The movie? A stupid story about virtual reality gone wrong that seemed to have more to do with Flowers for Algernon that it did with SK’s story.
SK actually had to sue to get his name taken off the film. It is that disgusting. With the exception of the title, the two have not a thing to do with one another.
I have said it in other threads and I will say it again, if you want to make a SK book into a good movie, you must work with him on the script. It is essential that you consult an author (when possible) to know what is most important to the story, and what was effectively just filler.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” --Whitman