I want to pound movie makers who 'rewrite' books.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I saw the movie ‘The Haunting of Hill House.’ It was pretty good, though I think it could have used more action in it.

What bugged my butt was that in the 1960s I read the book, by the same name and it scared the garbage out of me! I read the book several more times over the years and still got scared and fascinated by it.

The movie pissed me off on one level and that was that it didn’t follow the book except in two areas. 1: The mansion was called Hill House, 2: it was haunted.

Is there a problem with movie people actually managing to follow most of a story line of a book they choose for a film? I think if I was an author, and a movie company bought the film rights to my work of months and then took the title and the ending and threw the meat away, I’d be outraged!

They left out the mysterious room which could only be seen from outside, the children’s ghostly voices singing ‘going in and out the window,’ added in a main theme that was not in the book and twisted a few things around.

Plus, what was with that flooded corridor where they ran along on stacked up books? Just tossed in as an after thought? Why was it flooded at ground level? Why didn’t the care takers neither mention it nor attempt to fix it?

Then the care taker himself. He had, what, a 5 minute part? I can’t recall his name right now, but he’s a big time star! He’s been in lots of movies.

Don’t you hate reading a book, then going to see the movie and finding it so changed that you want to kick the scriptwriters butt up around his shoulders?

I mean, I wanted to find out if they ever discovered the hidden room, seen only from the outside, in the movie. They never did in the book.

They overdid the house too. I think they borrowed a lot of statuary from the last few Batman sets. You know, that chunky, not very well done, blocky, brooding stuff? (They screwed up Batman also. Gotham city was not supposed to be that dark and foreboding.)

2

Oh, yeah. They left out the hidden room entirely.

3

Old anecdote about James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, etc.:

A visitor is sitting with Cain in his den, and says “How did you feel about Hollywood screwing up your novels?”

Cain points to his bookshelf and says, “Hollywood didn’t do anything to my novels. See? They’re all right up there on the shelf.”

In other words, no matter what a filmmaker does to a book, you can always go back and read the book.

The 1963 version of The Haunting was a damn good film. Sure, it left a lot of the good stuff from Jackson’s novel out, but if I want to read it again, it’s right there on the shelf.

It’s not easy to get everything from a novel into a screenplay, and there’s a lot of stuff in most novels that SHOULDN’T be in a screenplay. A movie’s a whole different animal.

4

This is an age-old debate. (Well, a shortish age.)

They’re two different media. What, you want a movie of an author standing there reading the book to you? The same story, to be equally effective in two different media, has to be presented in two different ways. And each medium has its particular strengths and weaknesses, so a good director will work with those instead of against them.

That said, it’s true that the book is usually better than the movie.

Exceptions:
American Psycho
A Clockwork Orange
Misery [Really, any Stephen King movieization, with the possible exception of Maximum Overdrive, is gonna be less awful than its source material.]
All the Little Animals

Any others?

5

Aliens and Stephen Kings ‘Christine’ followed the books reasonably well.

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ essentially took around 10 to 15% of the book and threw the rest out.

‘2001’ followed the story line, so did Aliens, so did ‘Logan’s Run’ and a few others.

Plus, this movie spent 50% of the time on a somewhat boring initial buildup before getting to the special effects and the actual meat. (Almost like ‘Contact,’ except ‘Contact’ took up 95% of the story in buildup and all the good stuff was in the last few minutes. Contact sucked.)

6

Forrest Gump. The book was awful. The plot is also very different from that of the movie, which makes me wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just call the movie something else.

My personal favorite film adaptation of a novel is The Princess Bride. The ending was a bit different from that of the novel, but that sort of alteration is actually provided for within the book.

7

Hi, Skribbler! How are ya?

“Aliens” was, it should be manifestly clear, not a novel before it was a movie. The novelization, as with all “movie tie-ins” of that sort, is written concurrently with shooting and is based on the screenplay.

“2001,” the Arthur C. Clarke novel, was also written concurrently with the shooting of the movie, and resulted in some ideas in the novel being left out of the movie, and vice-versa. The original source was Clarke’s short story, “The Sentinel,” which dealt solely with finding the artifact on the moon.

“Logan’s Run” departed from the novel in a couple of very significant ways, especially who Logan finds when he eventually reaches Sanctuary, and what happens after.

8

what the hell are you talking about? kubrick’s film lacks the whole point behind the book. kubrick’s film lacks the enjoyment of reading nadsat. kubrick’s film lacks many other things.

have you even read the book?

this is my first example of the movie not being even close to as good as the book.

read it again, if you have read it. you obviously missed something the first time.

9

Hmmm…

10

What was done to Stephen King’s Running Man is just unforgivable. :mad:

11

They are filming the first book of TotR as we speak. It is supposed to follow J.R.R.'s masterwork fairly close, but we will just have to see.

I think the worst part of the books to movies thing is that a huge portion of the general public will see the movie, and assume the message is the same as the book, which most of the time is just way off. Guliver’s Travels was written with the intent of criticising and making fun of the scientific community, and basically ended up showing us how wrong Swift was about it. The TV version with Ted Dansen sort of reversed the message, or perhaps missed it altogether. Most of the Frankenstien’s are so wrong… I don’t want to talk about it. Everyone seems to put their own spin on the classics, and that is just bad. Evil. Wrong.

12

Skribbler:

Much as I liked the movie “Christine”, it didn’t really stay all that faithful to the book. Ultimately, the source of Chjristine’s evil is a sprite who inhabits first the guy who they bught the car from, then the car itself. In the movie the car starts off inexplicably evil, right on the assembly line.

I’d say “Dead Zone” was a muc better and effective translation of a Stephen King original to the creen (or “Stand by Me”, or “Shawshank Redemption”, or “Green Mile”)
Most sf novels don’t survive the transition to the screen very well, but “The Andromeda Strain” is unusually faithful. The exception was the “sex change” of one character from male to female – and a middle-aged female at that! Critics made a big deal abouit Sigourney Weaver’s role in Alien originally being written for a man, but somehow missed this example from almost a decade earlier.

13

Hmmm. I could argue that Frankenstein is considered a “classic” BECAUSE of Boris Karloff.

If Hollywood had never bothered to adapt Shelley’s novel (or Peggy Webling’s play version), I’ll betcha the current book sales (and the impact on the cultural radar) would be equal to or less than Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

14

Dude! Chill!

As the man said, YMMV.

Yes, I read the book: I’ve probably read everything Burgess ever wrote, and CO at least twice. Burgess’s writing is dry and clinically “literary.” Everything he ever wrote is obscured by the shadow of Joyce; you know the pages of his bedside copy of Finnegans Wake were all stuck together. Kubrick’s film came closer to enfleshing (new word!) the heart of Burgess’s theme than did Burgess himself.

So from my reading, you obviously missed something.

15

THis is at the heart of the whole Forrest Gump thing (see somebody’s post above). The book was a vicious, vicious satire–a very meanspirited book–that held up FG as an illustration of the self-destructive dumbing-down and pandering of American culture. It was very effective, but very very nasty.

The movie so didn’t get it. The movie was an even worse example of exactly what the book was so disgusted with.

16

Actually…no. They are filming The Lord of the Rings right now, but not in chronological order. They are doing it one set at a time, which is mostly chronologically. Its to maintain some consistency between the three movies. I think its a great idea. And since they’re doing all three at the same time, you don’t have to worry about actors not re-signing or quitting between films.

While I am skeptical (i.e. Sean Austin as Sam Gamgee), I think for the most part casting was VERY well done, and this will certainly be an improvement on the animated version. And I can’t wait to see how they interpret a Balrog…

17

Personally, I’m on the side that prefers books and movies to be different, as long as they’re both good. Telling a story visually requires different techniques and if it cannot encompass everything in the book, or it must do it in a different way, it should. Trying to remain too faithful to the book can ruin a movie.

If the movie version modifies characters, storylines, or even themes it should be viewed on its own merits rather than in comparison. The important thing is that if it makes changes, it must succeed on its own merits. What is really bad is when a movie departs from the book in a big way, but then tries to incorporate interesting portions of the book that are now distracting or don’t fit anymore. So the best approach is to stick to the major themes and plot of the book; this requires less rewriting of characters, and is of course the ideal if the filmmakers want to actually tell the story of the book.

IMHO, the best director I’ve seen at adapting books was Stanley Kubrick. Almost every movie he made was based on a book, and they all succeed by modifying the book.

I rather enjoy it when I can watch a movie and read a book and enjoy them both, even if they’re different.

Some movies that I can think of (aside from Kubrick’s oo-vruh):

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies ever. It made changes (setting, characters) from Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and created a completely different mood for a similar story. The book (especially vs. the director’s cut) explores the themes differently and so I enjoy them both.

I enjoyed the movie of Great Expectations well enough, since the story is actually interesting if it’s not padded out for several hundred pages. It was far far preferable to the hellish misery my entire class had endured reading the book (which unfortunately put me off Dickens for three years).

As an example of a combination that failed, there’s plenty, and they do mostly come from the same source … Disney’s Three Musketeers had less resemblence to Dumas’ book than a candy bar commercial. Still, it could have worked except that they tried to keep most of the characters the same, and even included events from the book that barely made sense considering where the plot of the movie was heading.
Random ending thought : Speaking of Running Man, has anyone checked out http://www.realityrun.com ?

18

Contact didn’t suck. It just captured most of what Sagan was trying to say. (The movie differed from the book, BTW. In the book, several people made the trip.) IMHO, what people didn’t like (and I don’t mean you personally, Skribbler) was that Contact is a science-fiction movie without Bug-Eyed Monsters ("BEM"s) and ray guns. The “battle” in the movie was not between the Action Figure and the Evil Menace, but between Science and Politics. Most audiences who go to see a science-fiction film want to see Battlestars.

I found this to be a beautifully-shot, well-acted film with a sound foundation in science. (Well, except for the FTL travel, but you know what I mean.) It was refreshing to see a movie that played like a book.

19

Me too, Coldie – When does it end? :rolleyes:

20

Apocalypse Now was an excellent and surprisingly faithful rendition of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Sure, the setting is different, the characters are different, and the events are certainly different. Nevertheless the movie does justice to Conrad’s literary work. It captures the dreamlike narrative, the slow and brooding descent into the heart of the jungle, the madness of its denizens (both natives and colonizers), and the corruption of Kurtz’s soul. Although it bears little surface resemblance to the novella, I think Apocalypse Now is perhaps the best treatment of a literary work I can think of.

MR