But that’s got to be considered a special case, as both movie and book were being produced at the same time, one did not proceed the other.
Asimov wrote a novelization of the script, but production delays (and a lack of coordination – novelizations were not that common), had the novel on the stands before the movie came out.
Asimov saw the problem and fixed it when he novelized it.
Note that the script was written by Jerome Bixby, author of the classic TZ episode, It’s a GOOD Life
Whit Stillman wrote a novelization of his film The Last Days of Disco several years after the movie came out. It’s an interesting case – written from the point of view of one of the movie characters who points out where the movie got things wrong.
This is the one that stands out to me the most. I read it before I saw the movie, and was disappointed by how much got “cut out” of the movie. The book made things make more sense, what characters’ motivations were, including those of the aliens, as well as describing much better the scenes that were occuring. (For instance, why the sub crashed, or how Bud knew which wire to cut.)
Sme have mentioned the Star Trek Novelizations, but I have to mention Star Trek V here. I thought it was a really good book, and a pretty good story, but when it got put on the big screen, it was pretty terrible.
Combining these two snips to point out to me at least, that a more complete story normally feels ‘better’ to me. In the case of the The Abyss, and my example of the Black Hole, you get all these elements that generate WTH moments in the movies, because characters act in ways that make no sense, or show skills that come out of nowhere. Which breaks immersion.
With more complete background, there’s normally a reason said events happen, and thus the suspension of disbelief can remain unbroken. Again, utterly personal choice, but for me that’s the better story.
Then again, it’s going to be a lot about what sort of movies you’re evaluating - I think we’ve all noticed that this comes up a LOT in Scifi, which by nature, tends to need more explanation of the ‘how’ of things.
Which one? He basically wrote two novelizations, the first one sticking closer to the plot of the movie, and the second in which he fixed a number of flaws he saw in the movie’s plot.
I sort of view it like the inverse of TV/movie producers feeling compelled to flesh out and explain everything that happens off-screen.
I mean, the viewer doesn’t need to know what’s going on off-screen in most fantasy stories (LOTR, Witcher, GoT, etc…) but it’s like the producers think they’re too stupid to just realize that stuff is going down elsewhere and neither they nor the characters know what’s going on. Authors do this all the time, but producers feel like they have to flesh stuff out.
And in novelizations, it’s the opposite. The authors tend to flesh out stuff that’s just a detail or entirely glossed over in the film/TV versions. IIRC, the Rebel troops who were just nameless guys in camouflage in RoTJ were actually described in a little detail in the novelization.
The trick is in the balance I figure. There’s no point in fleshing out all the off-screen stuff when adapting a book to the screen, just like there’s not much point in going into extreme detail of off-camera stuff when novelizing a film/TV show.
Cite?
AS far as I know, he wrote one novelization of the movie, in which he fixed some of the plot holes. I never heard that he wrote two.
He later wrote an original novel based on a similar premise. It had the theme of a miniaturized sub traveling through a human body, but other than that a totally different plot. Not a direct sequel, it took place in a different continuity.
Is that what you’re thinking of?
I never read it but I’m aware of a novelization of Spaceballs which has to have fixed all the plot holes in the movie I hope.
Similarly, the novelization of Galaxy Quest attempts to repair one of the gaping plot holes of the movie: how the Thermians could have constructed a device like the Omega 13 if it had never been explained in detail in the television show (the device was in Part One of a two-parter that was never completed).
While the novelization of Ghostbusters isn’t necessary better than the movie (a high bar to hurdle) it gives wonderful backstories on the main characters.
I found the novelization of V by A.C. Crispin to be far superior to the two miniseries it was based on, which was low-rent and campy in comparison.
I just remembered one I read in sixth grade, Battle for the Planet of the Apes by David Gerrold. It did a much better job of setting up the origin of the mutants in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and then subverting that future through Caesar’s actions.
Often, to ensure that the novelization doesn’t trail the movie by too much time, the writer works off an earlier draft of the script. The book of Die Hard With A Vengeance ends with the original surreal conclusion, with John McClane and Simon sitting across a table from each other spinning a bazooka between them while playing a game of riddles.
Some others took weird liberties. In the novelization of Ghostbusters, the dialogue between the leads is a lot more naturalistic, or at least less typical of Murray and Aykroyd’s line deliveries. After their first gig (catching Slimer at the hotel), Venkman says something like “That was about as easy as pushing smoke into a bottle with a baseball bat.” which immediately entered my vernacular upon reading it. Thre are also some bowdlerizations, like “This man is a jerk.” replacing “This man has no dick.”
The weirdest one for me was the (largely forgotten) The Manhattan Project, the flick about the genius high schooler who steals someplutonium to make a nuclear bomb for a sicence fair project. The novel has a ton of backstory, much of it about the lead’s music fandom, and his best friend’s suicide. The friend had turned him on to Richard Thompson; that book was my introduction to Thompson and I think I bought Shoot Out The Lights because of it. In the book the lead is also a Shriekback fan, which is a pretty deep cut for a trashy paperback that probably sold a few hundred copies from drugstore racks. None of that was in the movie, and Christopher Collet’s performance is kind of flat and shallow, with little characterization.
Also, on the subject of adaptations based on earlier drafts of a script…
The Target brand novelizations of Doctor Who were a fascinating phenonemon. Partly because they were often the only way for fans to experience old episodes of the show before reruns, and also taking into account the lost episodes of the show they were the sole surviving record of the continuity, but also because they were often written by the actual screenwriter of the relevant serial, and they could flesh things out in ways that diverged from what was onscreen. That authorship is also why there have been some gaps in the adaptations over the years. Douglas Adams was asked to adapt his scripts (he was story editor for a few seasons but only had credited authorship on a few stories) but when that happened, Hitch-Hikers’ had become a huge success, and he declined cranking out another novel for a mere thousand pounds. Decades later, long after his death, those were turned into hardcover novels. Another oddity is that the Target books had a standard page count, no matter how many episodes the serial ran. So The War Games at ten episodes was equally thick as Black Orchid at two, meaning some adaptations veered closer to summaries and others got padded out.
Also, I remember the Marvel Comics tie-in of the original Star Wars included scenes that wouldn’t appear onscreen until the reissue in 1997, like Han meeting Jabba at the Falcon before he leaves Tattooine (when Jabba was still conceived as a humanoid figure).
That is it. Despite the title implying that it’s a sequel, it’s really more of a re-write of the original. IIRC, he wrote a foreword explaining that.
There was a TV version of the movie, with some shots redone with different dialog. Maybe the novel closely follows this version.
Some of it does have the whiff of that. I’ve read the published screenplay, though (it was a gorgeous trade paperback with loads of Bernie Wrightson storyboards, I wish I knew where my copy went), and it was definitely noticeably different from the novelization.
In the 1950s and early 1960s Dell comics would often do adaptations of movies as tie-ins, and interesting bunch they were. (Later on, reprints of these and new adaptations were done by Gold Key comics). Sometimes they had the actual film to work from (as in the case of the Russian import The Sword and the Dragon, the title they gave to the cut down and dubbed version of Ilya Muromets) . But if it was a movie just being made it’s clear that they only had a description or a script to go by, and had to try to figure out how it was going to look.
So in the 1960 comic based on The Lost World the script or description evidently says “Tentacle Monster”, and they drew a bunch of tentacles (without the rest of the monster), and it looks nothing like the film. Or the Graveyard of Bones they run through. For one scene, not having a description of the dinosaur, the artist cleverly drew an eye looking out from the cover of leaves – it was mysterious and atmospheric. For some scenes they evidently had publicity stills, and in those cases, the drawing is practically a tracing of the photo. They even managed to add some lethal-looking teeth that weren’t in the original.
For the adaptation of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad they clearly had very little to go by – neither much of the script nor images of Harryhausen’s creations, so the comic adaptation was just sort of winging it, with little resemblance to the film. Many years later, years after the movie was out, Marvel did a much more faithful adaptation.
The adaptation of Atlantis: The Lost Continent is interesting because it includes scenes cut from the released film. They either got a lot of stills to work from, or else saw the rough cut, because the images closely resemble the film. See my article here – Atlantis — The Lost Continent – The Writings of Stephen R. Wilk
Gold Key’s 1969 adaptation of King Kong is really interesting, because it appears to be based on the Delos W. Lovelace novelization rather than on the 1933 movie. It has the triceratops attack (not in the film – Peter Jackson seems to have done an homage to it in his Director’s Cut of his 2005 version). Kong is shown onstage in a cage, rather than simple trussed up. Ann Darrow looks like a 60s-era woman rather than a 1933 starlet, and Carl Denham has a pith helmet and a moustache (as Robert Armstrong did in Mighty Joe Young, many years later, but not in Kong.)
There are plenty of other examples. They were clearly trying to fill in the blanks for the comic version of Fantastic Voyage and The Mysterious Island and others.
Are you familar with these?
http://www.moviecomics.net/2016/07/movie-comics-featuring-movie-comics-1.html?m=0
They apparently pasted in photos of the actors’s heads with creepy results, and included lots of movies I cant see kids being interested in.