CalMeacham, I wasn’t aware that anybody thought of De Camp as an ogre. Who thought that? I met him once or twice.
Oh, God. I’ve got the book, read it more than once, but I only just got that.
:smack:
Was the screenplay written first or the novel? Novels are routinely written before the movie is released.
On the pages devoted to Robert E. Howard there are plenty of complaints, both about his treatment of the Howard stories, his tight-fistedness, and the character he ascribed to Howard in the buiography he wrote (Some Lovecraft fans don’t care for the bio he wrote about Lovecraft, either).
Here’s probably the most extreme example, a 16-part series entitled “The de Camp Controversy” (Part 1 is at the bottom of this page. You can navigate to find the others)
This guy is definitely not alone in his feelings – there are plenty of others saying the same things on various boards.
AK84, the screenplay for Love Story was written first.
I came here to say this, too. It really does give a lot of insight into Sarah’s character and really explains why she’s so mired in her childhood.
The novelization of Willow is also pretty good in that way; a lot more background information and explanatory scenes, like the history between Razel and Bavmorda, Matmartigan’s fall from grace, Sorsha’s upbringing, etc.
I’m not sure I would call either book a great novel, but they are both great adaptations of screenplays.
They also took non-Conan Howard stories and converted them into Conan stories. But they were pretty upfront about it in the Lancer books. And that deCamp’s view of Conan’s character is different from Howard’s is hardly surprising. deCamp’s own work is very different in tone.
I don’t know about Love Story (never having seen the movie) but there is often a large gap between the first screenplay and what gets filmed, so counting what is published in both cases might make sense. Novelizations often include stuff that got cut.
One that stands out is the book published as a tie-in to the film Animal House, written by Chris Miller.* It’s not just words, but includes a lot of artwork and stuff made up to look like contemporary documentation. What’s interesting is that it fills in a lot of gaps, delivering material they clearly wanted to include in the movie, but didn’t, apparently because of time limitations and, I suspect, because they feared for their movie rating. In these pages you can see, for instance, the deleted scenes of director Jon Landis as a cafeteria wonk facing off against John Belushi’s Bluto, and learn how Pinto got his Omega House nickname. Some of the artwork is by impressive contributrors – NL regular cartoonist Sherry Fleniken, a two-page spread by Boris Vallejo, and an wonderful parody of Picasso’s Guernica to headline the last “chapter”. You really do need to read this book to fully understand the film.
Unfortunately, it was cheaply made, and the glue in my copy is letting go. Fortunately, they republished it ecently, and I saw a copy in a bookstore this week.
*Most movie tie-ins, the ones that aren’t for kids o direct novelizations, are pretty awful and useless. The ones for Time Bandits and Blues Vrothers, which superficially resemble the Animal House one, in being combinations of words,artwork, and supplementals, look like nothing more than attempts to drag out some additional cash from viewer’s pockets. They ad nothing to the film.
Animal House, by the way, was based on a series of short pieces that appeared in National Lampoon, and use the same names and location, but they hadn’t “jelled” to produce the same feeling that they had in the film.
Original edition:
29th Anniversary edition (2007):
Yup – I read all the Lancer editions (and Conan of Cimmeria, when Ace finally brought it out). And de Camp duid say when he rewrote something, and did say that he extensively rewrote The Black Stranger. That’s not what bugs the deCamp haters. They dislike that he sat on the rights and prevented publication of the original stories without his additions (“The Black Stranger” wasn’t published during Howard’s lifetime. It first saw print with de Camp’s additions and an editors in magazine in the 1950s, then in ythe deCamp-edited Gnome Press hardcover in 1953 newly changed by de Camp, then in the Lancer edition in 1967, still with deCamp’s changes. It wasn’t until 1987 that Howard’s version was finally published in Echies of Valor, which wasn’t that widespread a book. The recent Conan omnibus editions published by Wandering Star and Del Rey were the first to bring the story to a broad audience.
deCamp’s changes aren’t merely a difference in style, he also changed the ending to shoehorn it into his imposed chronology. (In many stories he took a briefly mentioned villain, the magician Thoth-Amon, and puffed him up into a recurring Moriarty-like figure, which Howard doesn’t seem to have intended).
The prohibition of the publication of Howard’s original material and perpetuation of his own version is what chiefly ticked off the fans. To say that he changed the story without giving the original didn’t mollify them – it seemed to dangle the knowledge that the original existed in front of them without letting them see it, which infuriated them.
I don’t think de Camp deserves the scorn heaped on him. Some of the deCamp-haters try to tear down his own work. It’s true that it hasn’t survived as well as Howard’s, but that’s true of lots of notable writers from his period. I still search out his works. Lest Darkness Fall is an acknowledged classic, and keeps getting reprinted. Lost Continents is still in print, too, AFAIK, and The Ancient Engineers keeps getting republished. His other works are worth digging up and reading, especially his historical novels, like An Elephant for Aristotle, The Bronze God of Rhodes and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate
I had this, and the sequel - before video was ubiquitous, it was the only way to see the films. I remember the books included all the “special edition” bits that were cut from the movies, because Foster was working from the original screenplays. Alien revealed the final fate of Captain Dallas and Aliens had the sequence with the sentry guns. For several years I could pride myself on having all this super-secret knowledge although as far as I know the footage is now available on the blu-ray releases (and was re-added to Aliens). Foster also did a bunch of Star Trek tie-ins which, again, were dead handy if you didn’t have a video recorder.
I remember Craig Shaw Gardner’s novel of the Tim Burton Batman being decent. Off the top of my head I was under the impression that there were two novelisations of Batman Returns - one for grown-ups and a “young adult” version - but I can’t find anything to back this up. Either I’m wrong, or the world is wrong, but the world has been wrong before. THIS! (points to sword) THIS! you can trust. The other anecdote I trot out every few months is the case of Dr Strangelove, which was based on a novel that was turned into a radically different film which was then novelised by the author of the original book. Also, the man who wrote the novelisation of Back to the Future was killed by a bee!
You know, I was in Venice last week, and hanging out of somebody’s window was a Rocky II t-shirt. And I’m thinking to myself “did they buy that t-shirt in 1979, and keep it all these years, or is it a recent re-issue - and if so, why Rocky II? No-one remembers Rocky II”. That’s got nothing to do with novelisations, I just had to share it with someone. Before it’s all lost in time, like soil in gravy.
The book versions of Yes, Minister, and Yes, Prime Minister were just as entertaining than as the TV shows - they fleshed out the background information with witty footnotes and condensed the stories to just the right length. Nothing about sentry guns, though, or continuity-breaking revelations about the alien life cycle.
If you’re talking about “great” novelisations - in the great works of literature sense - then no, there have been no great novelisations of movies. In my opinion all the truly great films are intrinsically filmic, e.g. they only work in that medium, and a novelisation of a great film would either be inferior simply by dint of cutting out the filmic elements, or would be so radically different that a wise author wouldn’t bother. I can envisage a situation where a talented author spots the germ of greatness in an otherwise inferior film, and turns it into a brilliant novel, but again why would that person not simply change the character names and the dates and release it as a wholly original work? In theory a multi-medium film/novel gesamtkunstwerk - 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example, or The Hitch-Hiker’s Etc - might achieve greatness but neither of those examples were thoroughly great (the novel of 2001 is slim pickings without the film) and I can’t think of any others, and in any case they wouldn’t be complete without the whole. It would be wrong to split the novel from the totality of the artwork.
Looking at this list of “100 Best Novels”, I never realised that Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard were the Greatest Novelists of All Time, but they were, with no less than seven out of the ten best novels ever written being written by them.
Ashley Pomeroy, that’s a list of best novels as voted on by people who cared enough to vote online. That isn’t a critic’s list of best novels. It’s not really even a list of best novels as voted on by people interviewed on the street or on the phone. It’s the people who knew about the poll, which quite likely means that some websites decided to get all their regular readers to vote in it. It proves nothing except that some fandoms care enough to organize their members to take part in polls.
That list is pretty hard to believe, with not only Battlefield Earth, but also Mission Earth and Fear by Hubbard listed. Ya gotta figure that the Scientologists participated, and only restrained themselves so that it wouldn’t look too obvious that they were canting the list. Nobody outside the Cult has anything at all god to say about the interminable Mission Earth series, which by all accounts much worse than Battlefield Earth.
They’d have a better chance nominating Fear, which dates from back before Bubbard’s Dianetics period, and won some praise. It’s kinda hard to see it called a “novel”, though. Before Bridge Publications started reprinting it, it was usually bound with some other stuff and sold as a long short story or a novella.