### Author:  [@sdimbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sdimbert)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/29 "2000-04-13T14:20:00Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Originally posted by sdimbert:
> [BThat’s what most of this film needed: A compassionate medic named Kevorkian in a silly helmet to put it out of its misery.\*\*
Damn! :mad: I always screw up the final potshot.
What I meant to say was:
BThat’s what most of this film needed: A compassionate Kevorkian in a silly helmet to put it out of its misery.\*\*
Sounds better that way, doesn’t it? 😉
---
### Author:  [@sdimbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sdimbert)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/30 "2000-04-13T16:05:00Z")
:gleeful giggle:
I just re-read your post, **GaWd** :
> [@](#):
>
> Originally posted by GaWd:
> **The other author who I just HATE to see in cellulose in Dean R. Koontz.**
Main Entry: cel·lu·loid
Pronunciation: 'sel-y&-"loid
Function: noun
Etymology: from Celluloid, a trademark
Date: 1871
1 : a tough flammable thermoplastic composed essentially of cellulose nitrate and camphor
_ **2 : a motion-picture film \
### Author:  [@Chef\_Troy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chef_Troy)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2000, 5:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/31 "2000-04-14T05:46:00Z")
In Heinlein’s _Number of the Beast,_ the four characters have figured out that their space/time twister can take them to the universes where beloved fictional settings are real, e.g. Oz, Barsoom, and so on. They compile a list of stories they all re-read for pleasure when they don’t have the energy to tackle a new book. In the process of tallying the votes, Zeb asks if Heinlein got any votes, and Hilda answers, “four votes, split: two for his “future history,” and two for _Stranger in a Strange Land_.” Zeb sniffs and remarks, [I’m paraphrasing] “I won’t embarrass anyone by asking who voted for _Stranger_. The tripe some people will write for money!”
It was interesting to see that sort of self-deprecating humor…it’s the sort of thing that I’d sooner expect to see Stephen King do.
* * *
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
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### Author:  [@Danielinthewolvesden](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Danielinthewolvesden)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/32 "2000-04-13T20:13:00Z")
Sdimbert, NO, I do not think “Starship” was adapted well, I said it was “OK” (ie if you forget it was supposed to be an adaptation of
one of RH’s best, and consider it as a great action flick, it is “OK”.) 6th Column is pretty racist. (NOT a juvenile, but an “early”). Knowing how Campbell was, I could only shudder to think how bad it was prior to RH doing it. I never said RH was racist, only that some of his earlier books have some racist themes.
I agree with REALITY re RH’s stages. Moon was his peak, with Stranger starting to slide. “Time” shows flashes of the old RH greatness, true, which makes it all that much more painful to read. I want to add Glory Road as one of the best.
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### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 8:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/33 "2000-04-13T20:34:00Z")
I’m a movie guy, so I’m going to weigh in here on a couple of items.
As a screenwriter, I can concur one hundred percent with what **stolichnaya** said towards the beginning: Stories work different on screen. As a good example, go check out Orson Scott Card’s site; he’s been trying to shepherd _Ender’s Game_ to the screen, and he’s kept his fans updated by publishing parts of the script he’s been working on. I know he’s proud of it, but what he’s written will not, repeat will not, work as a script. You can’t say, “A character thinks such-and-such.” The character has to do or say something that tells the audience how they feel.
For an excellent example of a film adapted from a book that changes almost everything in order to wind up with the same effect, check out _Never Cry Wolf._ The film couldn’t be more different, compared to Farley Mowat’s original book, at least superficially, in terms of plot and tone. But you’ll notice, in the end, the movie winds up with the same thematic conclusions, and has largely the same emotional impact as the book. As I said, it’s an excellent example of a movie that is forced to make superficial choices different from the book in order to have the same result.
**Notthemama** expressed trepidation about the upcoming _Lord of the Rings_ adaptation. Although it’s true that no book-to-film project will please all of the original’s fans, particularly the purists, I believe that this adaptation will be more successful than anyone expects. First, the director, Peter Jackson, is enormously talented. If you haven’t seen _Heavenly Creatures_, I recommend it highly. He’s a responsible and inventive storyteller; he can go wildly over the top (_Meet the Feebles_), or he can be restrained and subtle (_Forgotten Silver_). In online Q&A sessions, he has made it clear that this is his own interpretation, and that as much as he tries to stay responsible to the source material (he hired at least one Tolkien linguist on the production, to supervise the various Middle Earth languages), there are people who will be displeased. He maintains that even if he screws it up, he won’t have “ruined” the books, because they’ll still be there on the shelf, long after the film is forgotten. Still, there is the purist faction to worry about, people who will complain if “Cirith” is prounounced with a soft C, or if the elves have pointy ears, or other such (IMHO) insignificant details. Me, I have faith in Mr. Jackson, particularly after a 90-second advance trailer was made available for download (check out [www.apple.com’s](http://www.apple.com's) previews section); the footage is truly awe-inspiring. I think Jackson’s getting it right – this is not going to be another Bakshi travesty.
Now, a shameless plug: For information on upcoming movies, such as the _Stranger in a Strange Land_, a new version of _The Martian Chronicles_, and Mel Gibson’s long-stalled remake of _Fahrenheit 451_, among others, check out my website, **Movie Geek Central** – [http://moviegeek.homestead.com](http://moviegeek.homestead.com) . I put it up after many people requested I make all of my past movie reviews available; I’ve also fleshed it out with a whole lot of news, analysis, and other information. You can find status reports on various productions, buzz on upcoming projects, and all kinds of information.
Okay, shameless plug over.
Oh, one more thing: To **sdimbert** , who knocked the _South Park_ movie: Sorry, but it was absolutely brilliant. The juvenile and gratuitously profane surface was merely a facade for one of the wittiest, cleverest, most ingeniously structured satires on social mores I’ve seen in many years.
–Cervaise
P.S. Okay, sorry, one **more** thing: Most sci-fi (or, strictly speaking, SF) movies suck pretty hard, it’s true; _Mission to Mars_ wasn’t worth a teaspoon of monkey spit. But there’s a movie coming out that’ll make _M2M_ look like Kubrick’s _2001_ – the adaptation of _Battlefield Earth_, starring John Travolta as an evil Psychlo. He was on Leno last week pimping the film, and brought along a clip. This thing won’t just be bad – it’ll be bad with raisins in it, a knee-slapping must-see bomb of epic proportions. I can’t wait…
* * *
**Movie Geek Central** – Reviews, news, analysis, and more! [http://moviegeek.homestead.com](http://moviegeek.homestead.com)
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### Author:  [@sdimbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sdimbert)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/34 "2000-04-13T21:29:00Z")
\*\*Cervaise[\b]:
Man, people like you are why I spend so much time here; I probably would have _never_ met you in person, and I get to “hang out” with you online.
Cool! 🆒 Cool! 🆒 Cool! 🆒
> [@](#):
>
> Originally posted by Cervaise:
> **As a screenwriter, I can concur one hundred percent with what stolichnaya said towards the beginning: Stories work different on screen.**
Of course they do. That’s why people like us (who love to read) love to see movies… They’re both powerful, yet different, ways to tell a story.
As you said yourself:
> [@](#):
>
> Originally posted by Cervaise:
> **You can’t say, “A character thinks such-and-such.” The character has to do or say something that tells the audience how they feel.**
I direct plays - a medium similar to film in a number of ways. You’ve hit the nail on the head regarding a major difference between the written word and the performed action.
\*\*Regarding _LOTR_ you said:
> [@](#):
>
> He maintains that even if he screws it up, he won’t have “ruined” the books, because they’ll still be there on the shelf, long after the film is forgotten.\*\*
Sorry ☹ that doesn’t hold water (or, as LL would say, “I saw you palm that card!”). **Notthemama** but it best:
\*\*Originally poseted by Notthemama:
> [@](#):
>
> Because if it’s [movie adaptation of _LOTR_] totally lame, there’s 20 million people who will be turned off Tolkien, forever.\*\*
Good point. If a movie adaptation of a good novel is lousy (again, by “lousy” I mean **only** in terms of being faithful to the novel’s themes and plot) than many, many people will never give the book a chance.
And can I go out on a limb here and say that reading a novel is a more culturally rich experience than watching a movie? By that I mean that \*generally speaking[/], a person stands to gain more from the experience of reading a novel than he or she does from watching a movie.
If that’s true, than a well-meaning-but lousy novel-adapter is doing a disservice to those many, many lost readers.
\*\*Originally posted by Cervaise:
> [@](#):
>
> Now, a shameless plug: For information on upcoming movies, such as the _Stranger in a Strange Land_, a new version of _The Martian Chronicles_, and Mel Gibson’s long-stalled remake of _Fahrenheit 451_, among others, check out my website, **Movie Geek Central** – [http://moviegeek.homestead.com](http://moviegeek.homestead.com)
\*\*
Thanks for the link - I’m looking forward to reading more of your thoughtful commentary.
\*\*Originally posted by Cervaise:
> [@](#):
>
> Oh, one more thing: To **sdimbert** , who knocked the _South Park_ movie: Sorry, but it was absolutely brilliant. The juvenile and gratuitously profane surface was merely a facade for one of the wittiest, cleverest, most ingeniously structured satires on social mores I’ve seen in many years.\*\*
Nope. Wrong. 😉
\*\*Originally posted by Cervaise:
> [@](#):
>
> …the adaptation of _Battlefield Earth_, starring John Travolta as an evil Psychlo. He was on Leno last week pimping the film, and brought along a clip. This thing won’t just be bad – it’ll be bad with raisins in it, a knee-slapping must-see bomb of epic proportions.
ROFLMAO!! 😃
---
### Author:  [@GaWd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GaWd)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/35 "2000-04-13T21:49:00Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Originally posted by sdimbert:
> \*\*:gleeful giggle:
> I just re-read your post, **GaWd** :
>
> Main Entry: cel·lu·loid
> Pronunciation: 'sel-y&-"loid
> Function: noun
> Etymology: from Celluloid, a trademark
> Date: 1871
> 1 : a tough flammable thermoplastic composed essentially of cellulose nitrate and camphor
> _ **2 : a motion-picture film \
> Based on these definitions and my stated feelings about Koontz, I think I have to disagree. I would **LOVE** to see him covered in cellulose! :p\*\*
WOah…ignorance abounds! Thank you for pointing out that error. In retrospect, Dean Koontz in cellulose would be pretty gross!
ME
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### Author:  [@manhattan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/manhattan)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/36 "2000-04-13T22:50:00Z")
Sorry, guys. I left this thread here for a couple of days because it ended a hijacking and because this is where I suspect many of the Heinlen readers post. But you know where “survey” style questions go. I’m sending this one to MPSIMS on account of you’re not really debating all that much.
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### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2000, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/37 "2000-04-13T23:24:00Z")
Hey there **sdimbert**. It may interest you to know, I’m not a born-and-bred movie guy; my BFA’s in Stage Acting, so it’s good to run into another theatre maven.
Anyway: This thread drifted quite a bit; I suspected that if we ended up talking about movies in general, we’d get bumped to MPSIMS. And hey, look what happened! Anyway, I hope that by at least sticking to a discussion of adaptations, we can at least stay in orbit around the original question. To wit:
> [@](#):
>
> Sorry, that doesn’t hold water (or, as LL would say, “I saw you palm that card!”). **Notthemama** put it best:
>
> > [@](#):
> >
> > Because if it’s [movie adaptation of LOTR] totally lame, there’s 20 million people who will be turned off Tolkien, forever.
>
> Good point. If a movie adaptation of a good novel is lousy (again, by “lousy” I mean only in terms of being faithful to the novel’s themes and plot) than many, many people will never give the book a chance.
Please allow me to respectfully disagree, and provide several contrary examples.
First: David Lynch’s well-intentioned misfire didn’t hurt the popularity of _Dune_ any, at least not in the long term. In fact, as bloated and frustrating as the movie was, it spurred interest in Herbert’s books.
Second: When Gus Van Sant’s interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experimental remake of _Psycho_ was in cinemas, rentals of Hitchcock’s original went through the roof. A conspiracy-minded observer might suggest, as I did, somewhat facetiously, in my own review (available on [Movie Geek Central](http://moviegeek.homestead.com)), that this was Van Sant’s actual secret purpose. (Subtle but no less shameless re-plug over. Hee hee.)
Third: In the case of _Lord of the Rings_, we actually have a specific counterexample: Ralph Bakshi’s virtually unwatchable cartoon arrived with a huge splash, and is today virtually forgotten.
Fourth, fifth, sixth, etc: Laurence Fishburne in Oliver Parker’s misguided _Othello_, Jet Li in _Romeo Must Die_, Lloyd Kaufman’s _Tromeo and Juliet_, that teen gagfest _10 Things I Hate About You_, and any number of second-rate Shakespearean knockoffs.
The bottom line is this: The only time a movie can truly supplant the source material in popular consciousness is if the original book isn’t that well-known or established to begin with. Nobody reads _Jude the Obscure_ any more, for example; if anybody knows it today, they know it from the Michael Winterbottom film _Jude_, starring Kate Winslet. (Or, of course, the compulsory reading list in English Lit 201.) Ditto for Atom Egoyan’s film version of Russell Banks’s _The Sweet Hereafter_, among others. If the new film version of _Lord of the Rings_ blows chunks (and I don’t think it will), the only people who would be scared away from reading it are the knuckle-dragging forehead monsters who wouldn’t have read it anyway.
On a related topic:
> [@](#):
>
> And can I go out on a limb here and say that reading a novel is a more culturally rich experience than watching a movie? By that I mean that generally speaking, a person stands to gain more from the experience of reading a novel than he or she does from watching a movie. / If that’s true, than a well-meaning-but lousy novel-adapter is doing a disservice to those many, many lost readers.
You can sure say it, and I have no problem with your believing it. I would assert, though, that it’s a matter of personal opinion and preference, rather than an outright fact.
It’s difficult to generalize, naturally: I get more out of the average Jackie Chan movie than I’d get from reading a Harlequin Romance. But by the same token, I would hardly suggest that reading Proust’s _Remembrance of Things Past_ is surpassed by sitting through _Scream 3._
It seems to me that you’re entering into some fuzzy gedankenexperiment here, asking about an idealized Best Possible Novel vs. Best Possible Movie, and which provides the more fulfilling experience. Even then, I don’t think it’s a resolvable question, because the two forms are so different. Which is better, the taste of a really good chocolate mousse, or the fun of watching a hyperactive puppy chasing its tail? Can you even compare them?
P.S. By the way, there’s already a _Lord of the Rings_ thread running in MPSIMS. Should we cross-link so as to pick up both readerships, in case the Tolkein buffs ran screaming from the Heinlen subject line? 🙂
* * *
**Movie Geek Central** – Reviews, news, analysis, and more! [http://moviegeek.homestead.com](http://moviegeek.homestead.com)
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### Author:  [@Finagle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Finagle)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2000, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/38 "2000-04-14T03:59:00Z")
Whoa, wait a minute here. I read Jurassic Park. Awesomely bad.
a. Clearly a script treatment, not a book.
b. Given an admittedly interesting premise (cloning dinosaurs), where does he take it? Oh yeah, they get loose and kill people. _Real_ original.
c. What’s with the chaos theory gibberish?
> [@](#):
>
> Originally posted by SkySlash:
> \*\*Same thing with Michael Crichton’s books…it’s disturbing.
>
> …
>
> I read Jurassic Park- Brilliant
> I saw Jurassic Park- You’re kidding right?
>
> …
>
> \*\*
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### Author:  [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2000, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/39 "2000-04-14T04:17:00Z")
Any of RAH’s books could be made into a movie, but not in the way all of you are thinking. Anime is the answer to all of the problems outlined in the previous posts. Special effects, casting, extra-long stories, etc. would be no problem if Japanese-style animation were used.
* * *
Eagles may soar free and proud, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.
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### Author:  [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2000, 5:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/heinlein-books-and-movies/16124/40 "2000-04-14T05:12:00Z")
Okay, I want to chime in.
I like Heinlein. His works are very different, though. I laughed at the breakdown.
His later works do go off on very different themes, explore different angles, and get weird. But I very much enjoyed them for that.
Why don’t Heinlein films come across like the books? As has been mentioned, the difference in the media, the attitude by the writers/directors/producers/marketing, and the depth of material. _Starship Troopers_ was an excellent novel that spawned a subgenre of SF books - the mechanized armor books. But in truth, the ME was really a small part of the book - a flashy detail to be sure, but ultimately not the point of the book. (Sure would have been cool, though.) In fact, the real depth of the book comes from exploring the social conditions, the societal structure, the shaping of the character, etc. That was what is often missed in Heinlein movie adaptations. The movie was enjoyable (to me), but it wasn’t the novel, it was sort of taking the concept and redoing it. Kinda like _Blade Runner_ to _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ Only mildly related.
Some of his early stories would make better adaptations than his later works. Minor reworks might be needed for details (placing them in far away star systems instead of on Mars or Venus, say).
One completely overlooked book that I thought was excellent was _Job: A Comedy of Justice_.
Divemaster, you probably won’t enjoy _Time Enough For Love_. It has all the weird stuff that _The Cat Who Walks Through Walls_ has. It is a bit of a ramble, with rampant sex, ideological rants, alternate views of morality, and other fun stuff.
I read _Stranger_ once a long time ago. I’m thinking I should read it again. (Oh hell, I want to read most of the books again.) I thought the beginning and set up of the theme was good, but it did go off course with the hippy cult stuff. It did make a few good points, though.
_Friday_ is good, and so is _Glory Road_. But I really like his “senile” stuff.
Maybe _Citizen of the Galaxy_ would work.
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