This was the theme of Saving Mr. Banks. Which implies, contrary to the experiences of some of the other authors mentioned in this thread, that some of the time authors manage to negotiate a contract that gives them the power to put their foot down and say “no”. Disney had to woo her / con her (Travers, I mean) into going along with what he wanted to do with Mary Poppins; or at least that’s how it was portrayed in Saving Mr. Banks. If he could have just told her “this is how it’s gonna be and you’re just going to have to live with it”, I assume he would have instead of having to sweet-talk her into allowing him to do it his way.
As I remember, when the studios were competing to get the film rights to the Harry Potter books, Disney tried to get it, but J.K. Rowling insisted on a high level of creative control and they didn’t want to give that up. For example, I heard they proposed using an American actor as Harry. So her involvement may have ensured a higher level of quality.
Right, which is why, even if you dont really like the way the Filmmaker went (personally I think Peter jackson made the best film of the century with LotR, and the first Hobbit was fine… the mistake was the executives ordering him to make it three films) that is NOT “taking a dump”.
Taking a dump includes MI (where he isnt even part of a team) and Maleficent , where all the Good guys are “really” bad guys and the evil Fey is just misunderstood. :rolleyes:That was due to catering to the star, Angelina Jolie. Same with MI- catering to Tom Cruse. He wanted it to be a solo act.
*Starship Troopers *is a odd case. Parody? Steaming pile of Crap? Ok film if you pretend it has nothing whatsoever to do with the book? I vote #3, along with the two Conan films.
The Seeker almost ignored the books- The Dark is rising, likely one of the best YA fantasy series ever.
The film adaptation drew strong negative reaction from fans of the book series[2][3] for its disregard of the source material.
However, is that taking a crap or just going your own way? In either case, the film was horrible.
However, even tho they Hollywooded up The House with a Clock in it’s Walls, it’s not bad. Fun film.
No, see, i disagree strongly. Look, books tend to be talky,with explanations, and you can do that and make a good film. Making it Hollywood is Ok. I expect that. But totally changing the theme and plot is what most of us mean by “crapping on it”. Adding some action, a love interest, etc- that is just part of making a film.
Holes, however, was pretty much true to that fine YA book.
Ah, but they DIUD dump on that book. The Huston/Bogart version was the third movie adaptation. The first version, with Richard Cortese from 1931, isn’t as good as the Bogart version. It actually includes some stuff from the book that didn’t make the 1841 version. But its conception of San Spade, with his huge expensive office, is way off the mark. But at least it didn’t dump on the book.
The second version, though, did. The 1836 Satan Met a Lady (what does that title even mean?) turned it into a comedy, changed the falcon into a horn, and c-starred an unwilling Bette Davis. Warren Williams stars as detective “Ted Shane” Some people claim to like it, but it’s an unfunny bore, and especially galling if you know how good the Huston version would be only five years later.
I strongly doubt it. Walt himself, of course, knew the books, as they were favorites of his daughters. So that’s just one example.
But the books were very well known in general. So if your supposition were true, the film would not have garnered the praise that it did.
Of course, maybe people in the 60s were more accepting of deviations from the source material when it comes to adaptations than modern audiences are.
Powers &8^]
I just saw the 1980s version of Journey to the Center of the Earth today. Seems the only thing they took from the Jules Verne story was the title and the subterranean setting. The rest of the movie’s atrocities I cover in oscarhopper’s Worst movie you have seen in 2018 thread.
In the Book, MP flies in on the wind, there’s a tea party with her Uncle, and she flies away again at the end. So, pretty much, yeah there is flying.
A bit obscure but I’d give the The Postman an honorable mention. The book spends a long time discussing how society collapsed and turned into a post-apocalyptic dystopia, rather than just jump straight into its post-apocalyptic warfare. Its based on idea that it was the “survivalists” (cold war era doomsday prepers, who were a phenomenon at the time the book was written) themselves who tipped society over the edge, and caused it to collapse after WW3.
All of that was totally lost in the god-awful Kevin Costner film, which surely enough jumped straight into post-apocalyptic warfare.
Highlander I: “We’re a bunch of mystical, superpowered people who have always been around; we take each others’ powers when we kill them and whoever takes the last other ones’ head will be all-powerful! There can be only one!”
Highlander II: “Nah, we’re just aliens, and there’s lots more of us.”
As I noted upthread (and in other threads here about Starship Troopers), #3 is really the answer. The script was originally called “Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine,” and was written with no apparent intent to adapt the Heinlein novel. When it was realized that the script bore some similarities to the novel, the studio licensed the rights to the book, and made superficial tweaks to the script to incorporate names and plot points from the book.
The director, Paul Verhoeven, read only the beginning of the novel, and is reported to have hated it, as he felt it to be “very right-wing.”
I agree with all of the above.
I’d like to suggest a book that was worse than the movie.
Anyone read the book Jaws? It was a very ordinary summer potboiler of a novel.
But the movie was a classic. It had characters with the same names, but totally changed them. Spielberg, at the age of 26, made a movie that was scary as hell without being overly gross. The dialogue was better too, and the suspense. They left out the stupid subplot of an affair between Hooper and Mrs. Brody(she was younger in the book). Oh, and in the book Hooper also died, the only survivor was Brody himself.
The Directors cut fixed that.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The movie went along just fine and I really loved Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly at first, but then it went soppy until all collapsed in a happy ending. I was so disappointed. Or as Wikipedia puts it: “The movie was transposed to 1960 rather than the 1940s, the period of the novella. In addition to this, at the end of the film the protagonist and Holly fall in love and stay together, whereas in the novella there is no love affair whatsoever—Holly just leaves the United States and the narrator has no idea what happened to her since then, except for a photograph of a wood carving found years later in Africa which bears a striking resemblance to Holly. In addition, there are many other changes, including major omissions, to the plot and main character in the film from the novella.”
I can’t believe nobody has mentioned the current crop of Star Trek movies. Clearly made by a cast and crew who have no idea what Trek is really about.
1956 noir (maybe) titled Wicked As They Come. A poor but beautiful woman will do anything to get and stay rich. Now this isn’t a bad movie. Sure, she screws everybody over, but in the end, she had a good reason to distrust men, and she paid for her crimes.
But…
The source material was a novella by Bill S. Ballinger, Portrait in Smoke, and if they’d followed this faithfully it would have been much, much better. The woman in this one was, in fact, wicked as they come. She did not have any more reason to mistrust men than the average 1950s dame (which is to say, some reason) but she used them at every step, beyond all proportion to anything they had done to her–wicked as they come describes her perfectly–and she did not get caught. And the guy she screwed over in the end, who was no peach himself, didn’t get caught either, but he’s running scared.
I’m assuming that the code at the time meant the character had to be punished and had to have redemption of some sort. I wish someone would remake this one now that they don’t have to do that.
It is still worth seeing, if you can find it. But the book is even more worth reading, if you can find it.
Re: Silence of the Lambs, this one disappointed me a couple of times. For one thing, and I guess many people wouldn’t notice this, but in the book Lecter was listening to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, which is almost a separate title than anybody else’s Goldberg variations. The movie played somebody else’s version of the Goldberg variations.
Also, fava beans and a nice Chianti? Chianti? Really? In the book he had the liver with a nice wine that I had never heard of, which fit perfectly with his character. I have heard of chianti. Everybody has. Therefore it does not fit his character. This is a guy with very specific tastes, not common ones. Not just anybody’s version of a piano piece and not just anybody’s vin ordinaire.
Of course the author himself stomped all over his own books with the sequels.
And Disney. Screwed up everything in an inimitable Disney way. Bambi, The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh.
Also very disappointed in The Wizard of Oz as, in the books, Oz was a real place, the inhabitants were not people from the farm in dreams, and there were more witches. I got over that though and actually liked it better after my kids watched it 143 times.
As long as I’m on a rant here, Postcards From the Edge. IMO they left out some of the very best bits from Carrie Fisher’s book, although I will admit that I may be influenced by the fact that I am not a big Meryl Streep fan and I went into that movie probably looking for something to criticize, and it was actually not Streep’s performance. I know they can’t put everything in but jeez, people.
So true.
I just look at the current Star Trek franchise as “The Movies That Galaxy Quest Parodied”.
They work in that respect, if you imagine Chris Pine decades later as Tim Allen’s burnt out Starship Captain Actor.
Capt. James T. “Jason Nesmith” Kirk: Never Give Up, Never Fuckin Surrender… Am I too late for Pegg’s panic attack?
[Simon Pegg hides his face in despair] Apparently not.
I’m going to guess that no one has listed “A Sound of Thunder” (2005) because they didn’t know it exists. Or possibly it’s because they don’t want to admit that it exists because of how terribly bad it is, but more likely the first. $80 million budget, $11.7 million worldwide box office, with less than $2 million from the US. Probably the worst adaptation of a classic sci-fi story, not just ever, but possible.
Terribly, terribly bad.
But honestly, it really wasnt that far off from the original. Just it was bad, and the original short was great.