Bobby Roberts writes:
> As for an acceptable reason for making a movie out of a book, if
> increasing the number of readers of the book isn’t one, what is
> a good reason? Are you saying that no books should ever be
> made into movies?
That’s not what I was saying at all. What I was saying was that the fact that something is a great novel is not a good enough reason to make a movie of it. Nor is there a good argument to be made that because something is a great novel and because we want to encourage a new generation of readers to discover that it is a great novel, we are therefore obliged to make a movie of it.
First of all, some great novels just can’t be made into good movies. Some novels simply aren’t cinematic, and any possible movie made from them wouldn’t be any good. But, yes, of course some great novels make great movies (or at least very good movies). The question that any producer should ask himself when deciding to make a movie is not whether the source material is good. He should look at the script of the proposed movie and say, “Is this going to be a good movie?”
I think it’s also a poor argument to say that because something is a great novel and we wish to encourage a new generation to read it, we are therefore obligated to make a film of it. So are we saying that today’s generation is so tied to film that they are unable to read a book not associated with a film? If you extend this argument, we are obligated to eat the restaurant meal tied to the movie tied to the book, since that will encourage the reading of the book. A movie is a movie. A book is a book. A restaurant meal is a restaurant meal. They all succeed or fail on their own grounds.
Malchats, Lewis was never writing two of the novels at one time. He had the idea of the first novel, wrote it, and sold it. He then had the idea for the second novel, wrote it, and sold it. And so forth. The novels were written in the same order as they were published. The publishers did not change the order of the books. They simply published them as Lewis sent them the manuscripts. The publishers, as far as I can find out, didn’t have any opinion about the order of the books.
I think the argument that Lewis wanted the re-ordering of the series is very weak. At no point did Lewis ask the publishers that they re-order the books. The only real argument for the new order is that, in one letter to a young boy who said that he preferred to read The Magician’s Nephew first, Lewis said that that was a good idea and that he could read the series in chronological order rather than published order. But, as I said, there’s no evidence that Lewis ever asked the publishers to change the order. The change of the order mostly was caused by the desire of Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, who claims that Lewis once told him that he preferred the chronological order.
Incidentally, I know this information because I’ve read an immense amount of biographical and critical material about Lewis.
The old ordering system does give you a sense of wonder, but I prefer things to be in the “correct” order, and by that I mean Chronological order.
: I’m not as big as a C.S. Lewis fan as I thought I was