The Last Picture Show – a little gem of a movie that more than did justice to the book.
Love Story – yes it was a horrible movie, but did you ever even TRY to read the book?
I understand all the words, they just don’t make sense together like that.
The best book-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen was A Clockwork Orange. The dialogue was almost verbatim from the book, the casting was excellent, and the sets were exactly as described in the book. Both mediums were extremely disturbing.
Sig! Sig a Sog! Sig it loud! Sig it Strog! – Karen Carpenter with a head cold
Speaking of Stephen King,
*“Cujo”[/] was better as a movie than as a book. The movie sucked, which tells you how bad the book was.
One of my favorite movie adaptations is “A Clockwork Orange”. In principle, it stayed very close to the book. Many specifics were changed or dropped, but the added visuals more than made up for them. The book is excellent; the movie is excellent, but for different reasons.
“The large print givith, and the small print taketh away.”
Tom Waites, “Step Right Up”
Have you noticed that every movie based on a Dean R. Koontz novel has sucked very, very badly? Why is that?
Apocalypse Now is a good modern update of the short story (MA) Heart of Darkness.
A Brief History of Time was a great book and I so wanted the movie to be good, but it sure wasn’t.
P.K. Dick has been lucky that the movies made from his books and short stories have been pretty good. I’m anxious to see if The Minority Report ever gets made, that was a great story.
Sometimes you feel like a coconut, sometime you feel like a yak.
Sam Stone:
Because pretty much every Koontz novel is a crappy cookie cutter cutout. Therefore every movie is just a little different from the other crap movies.
Okay, so his books aren’t the most terrible out there. I used to enjoy his books immensely, even still like a couple, but on the whole they are not that original or well thought out, or even well written. So if the book is at best average and at worst mediocre, the movie probably won’t be much better.
P.S. I really enjoyed Twilight Eyes and Hideaway. And look what a terrible movie Hideaway was, ugh, not even close to the damned book!
“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
I’m going to have to disagree, in part, with the good doctor on this one. I thought Burgess’s use of that Russian-based slang blunted some of the violence and sex depicted in the book by using unfamiliar, less gut-reaction terms. That wasn’t the case on film, since the action was portrayed rather than described. I found the film much more disturbing than the book, but less constructively so. When I finished the book I knew what a clockwork orange was and something about the hypocrisy of modern society. When I finished the movie it was more like – EEEWWWW!
I have the body of a god – Buddha!
As others have said, there is so much material in an average novel that some has to be cut to make a feature-length film. The cutting of material is one major difference, and then the differences in the mediums must be taken into account. To be as true to a book as possible the changes should be kept to a minumum.
Thus, I have often wondered why no one has created a “new” format, the finite television series. The Stand could have been an excellent 20 episode tv series, instead of the six or eight hour mini that was made. Gone With the Wind sounds like another example, although I have not read the book. Some novels lend themselves to two-hour movies, and I think some are written with that in mind, Crichton being a good example. He is an excellent writer, but you can tell when he has movie in mind (The Lost World, blech). Other novels span a great deal of time and so much must be cut to fit in even eight hours.
Sci-fi is doing a Dune mini, which looks to be pretty good, but why limit it to a mini? Dune may be the perfect example. Tell the first book in one tv season. If it is a huge hit, there is more material to go on into another season.
Comic books seem to be the only place I have seen this premise, a finite but lengthy series. 12 and 15 issue series are now common, and Starman and Preacher are winding up 70+ issue runs that were intended to be finite by the authors. Any thoughts on the finite, but longer than mini, tv series?
Well, I think the main problem with your suggestions (and I’m really hoping this appears under JoeBlank’s post) is the economics of TV.
On an episodic show, you want to hit at least 100 episodes, so that it can be stripped for syndication (which is where a show can actually reach profitability – and, of course, well beyond). A TV movie or miniseries, in theory, can be re-run in its entirety again. (Though, in practice, minis longer than four hours don’t seem to turn up anywhere again.) Your idea, though artistically valid, seems to be to fall between two stools economically.
Honestly, I don’t know that most books (except really big ones) would take more than eight hours to film effectively. And, of course, there have been some exceptionally long minis (WAR AND REMEMBRANCE, if I remember correctly, if the record holder at something like 22 hours).
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by MattStL:
**“The Princess Bride” was done as a movie just about as good as could be - but the book is still better."
Are you kidding? That book sucked. The movie was much better.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
What’s worse, books made into TV movies or books made into feature films?
I thought that “Silence Of The Lambs” was a pretty good movie, although I do think the book was better. I think the movie would’ve needed to be six or eight hours long to really get in all the detail that Thomas Harris provided in the book.
And while I don’t think that any movie could really do justice to Raymond Chandler’s novels, I do like “The Big Sleep” with Humphrey Bogart.
The movies I’ve seen based on Roddy Doyle’s books, The Commitments and The Snapper, both seemed pretty well matched to the books in quality, probably because those books rely so heavily on dialogue for their effects in the first place.
Then there’s the case of Jim Thompson, whose novels have served as the source for several movies, with widely varying results. You’d think Thompson’s novels would be nearly goof-proof movie fodder, but they seem to get screwed up more often than not. My favorite of the novels, and maybe the best, is The Killer Inside Me, but the movie, with Stacy Keach in the lead role, is awful – absolute, unmitigated dreck. I really wish someone would do it again, right, but it’ll probably never happen.
The Grifters is probably the best American film version of a Thompson novel, followed by After Dark, My Sweet – yes, I like both better than either version of The Getaway. Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, based on Pop. 1280, might be the best movie of the lot, and even that wanders from the tone of Thompson’s book.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige
I have to say that all of the Jane Austen adaptations they’ve had lately have been completely true to the book. I was very impressed with Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma. She protrayed her perfectly. I also was equally pleased with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in Sense and Sensibility. I saw the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice and I have to say that the actress must have lived, breathed and eaten Elizabeth Bennet, because I couldn’t imagine someone possibly doing her better. I haven’t seen the new Austen yet, Mansfield Park I believe it is, but I have high hopes that Hollywood gets this one right, too.
I rode Omni in Springfield, IL
Patriot Games
Book was awesome, and had the most suspenceful ending with good/bad confrontation I have ever see/heard/thought
Movie was good, but they gave it away, and the ending was so bad it almost ruined the performances
Stupid people surround themselves with smart people. Smart people surround themselves with smart people who disagree with them. - Isaac Jaffee
I’m eagerly awaiting the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to be released this coming windter. I have a feeling I’ll end up disappointed, but I’ll fork over my 7 bucks anyway!
“Honey we’re recovering Christians.”
–Tori Amos - In the Springtime of his Voodoo
There is one example of a long but finite seris on televison–Babylon 5, which was designed to run five years and then stop. This illustrates an important problem with the idea. After B5’s 3rd season they were renewed for a fourth, but the prospect of a fifth seemed dark. Thus, they moved a bunch of stuff that was supposed to be in the fifth season forward just to get the story finished. They ended up getting a 5th season, on TNT, so they were able to fill the rest out, but the original plotting was skewed. This is always going to be a problem for long, finite seris. No on wants to start filming, or to start watching, for that matter, a long story if they do not have reason to believe that it is going to be finished. Networks, on the other hand, want to reserve the right to cut anything anytime the ratings begin to slip.
I wish it were otherwise. I loved the structure and continuity of B5, and I think you could do similar things with long novels.
[Off topic rant] The real reason I like the finite concept, however, is that I am a closet romantic. Hollywood knows that ratings come from bringing couples together, not showing them happy, so you see a lot of shows where one or two seasons is spent bringing a pair together, and they break up two episodes later. This drives me crazy. If I watch a televison show, I have some investment in the charecters. When the work of seasons is undone after a few weeks I feel cheated: “Why did I bother watching that?” Furthermore, drama in an open-ended series quickly grows atale. It becomes hard to believe that so much stuff could happen in people’s lives year after year. In a finite series one avoids that problem: the premise for the show itself is that there is an extrodianry moment or event that transforms people’s lives in some meaningful, permanent way. The viewer/reader assumes that after that the charecter’s lives go back to normal. [/Off topic rant]
Now, Voyager is one of the best—the Bette Davis film follows the Olive Higgins Prouty novel almost line-for-line, and both are terrific.
Ditto, Double Indemnity; the movie is vastly different from the James M. Cain “novella,” but both are well worth it (the movie left out the Satan-worship subplot—yikes!).
I am desperately searching for the Rian James novel 42nd Street, on which the movie was loosely based—I hear tell the movie left out a LOT of sex, drugs and other interesting goings-on! Anyone have a copy? Can’t even find it over those Internet book searches . . .
has there been any book that has produced as many good films as Different Seasons?
look at the stories
the first one was made into a film recently, but cant remember the name of it, about the old Nazi and the kid… in the book the name was something like “Hope Springs Eteranl”
next “the Body”, made into “stand by me”
then Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" possibly the greatest translation from book to film ever.
but I dont think they’ll ever make a film out of the Breathing Method…
well, at least one person wants to meet me…
http://fathom.org/polldata/pollcheck.adp?poll=dope-page5&question=62
Cheers!!
Catch 22
The book made sense, I was confused by the movie after I read the book.