Should movie makers 'stick to the book'? (Maybe a debate)

Cafe Society
1

I think probably the most common movie criticism of all is ‘deviated from the original book’. So I was thinking… don’t movies actually always do this? - I can’t think of a single example where the movie was utterly faithful to the book. So, given that it’s such a common thing… why do we get so worked up about it?, and if it’s so common, doesn’t that mean there’s probably a good reason for it, most of the time?

I dunno - do you think it’s maybe that books are easier to love than movies, because you direct your own personal version of the movie in your head as you read them? - a version that doesn’t grate on your sensitivities?

What do you think? Is ‘sticking to the book’ a worthy goal, generally? Is it practically possible in many cases?

2

Page for page, and line for line, probibly not workable. You have to remember that the book it took you two weeks to finish the filmmaker has only 2 hours of film to work with. It has been discussed here before about the worst adaptations from print to screen (but I am too lazy to look them up.) I usually enjoy the movie if it tries to remain true to the book, such as Rambo by David Morrel and film by James Cameron, and am usually disappointed by movies which are loosely based upon the book, such as Running Man by Richard Bachman (Spephen King) film by Paul Michael Glaser.

So I guess you have to trust the filmmaker to take what he/she sees as important to the story which is never as good as you imagination.
YMMV

Sgt Schwartz

3

The problem that I see with this is that for every time I can think of a movie having been improved by deviating from the book, there are often other people who disagree.

I think that, realistically, the only sensible goal for the movie maker to choose when adapting a book to a movie is to maintain the ‘feel’ of the story. The characters are going to be basically the same. But even there, there are times that a character will need to be edited - a book, for example, can take the time to indulge in making a character terribly ambiguous, while a movie often doesn’t have the time to do that. The bare bones of the plot will remain the same, but even there editing will come into play. Whole subplots by the ream will be removed from the story of the book to make a 90 to 120 minute story for the audience.

In some ways, I happen to think that the filming of Dune is a particularly good example of what can happen if the filmmaker is too ambitious in trying to translate all of the book to the screen. When I saw the theatrical release in the theatre, I, and a friend, who’d also been familiar with the book enjoyed it. We weren’t all that impressed, but we enjoyed it. Of course, we also understood a lot of things that weren’t properly explained on screen - and had to provide all sorts of crib notes to our other friends who hadn’t read the book. I’ve heard that the longer director’s cuts are far more watchable, but the original film was just too much for most audiences to follow.

Granted, Herbert’s world was a bit more complex and needed more exposition to educate the viewer than would be needed in something set in contemporary American culture, and that played a big part in the problems the filmmaker had.

I think that part of the problem is that movie adaptations have a real hurdle to overcome: a novel is usually too complex to translate to the screen directly as a single session. I believe that the proper equation should be a feature length movie is roughly going to be equal to the same story complexity of a short story or at most a novella. There just isn’t the same room for exploration of the world that there is in a novel.

Another example would be Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. The novel portrays, for example, Richelieu as a particularly ambiguous character, but not as the main antagonist for the characters. The main antagonist is instead The Countess. Richelieu actually ends up supporting them. Both movie versions of the story (If I recall correctly) reduced things to make Richelieu the sole villian. (He’s got minions, of course, but none with independant will or goals.) It’s not an unreasonable simplification, but it certainly changes the story considerably.

However, I believe that both films did achieve the intent of remaining true to the ‘feel’ of the story. Which is why that I’m not going to claim that they weren’t untrue to the book.

It’s a hard line to walk, and often the filmmaker trips. Of course, there are times, too, that the filmmaker just takes the title of the book, and then goes off in his or her own way for the actual story. (Not that I would point fingers, but Starship Troopers or I, Robot come to mind.)

4

I have always maintained that a filmmaker has a responsibility to deviate from the book (I even criticized Sin City becasue of this). I will bitch about the adaptation, but only because I feel he deviated in the wrong places, and left out what I think je should have kept.

One of the things Peter Jackson was pretty clever about in the LOTR series was making the movies as long as he possibly could. That way any criticism of parts left out would beg the question, “and put it where?”

5

Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed. Of course it too eight hours to cover a book of fewer than 300 pages, so it’s not done all that often.

“Faithful” isn’t scene-by-scene or line-by-line. It’s faithful by sticking to the main plot and sensibilities of the book. An example of a faithful adaptation is Lord of the Rings – things were left out, but the main plot was shown and there was a sensibility that they were trying their best to portray the actions in the book.

An example of an unfaithful adaptation was Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which turned the book into Harry Potter Clones of a Place Called Earthsea but Really Isn’t All That Much Like It.

With a good, well known book, yes. Though sometimes that’s not possible – witness the movie Dune, which tried to capture the book in two hours and, though it ultimately failed, tried pretty hard to be faithful.

With a bad book, then you might as well do what you want. Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) threw away everything but the title and a few of the questions; a movie of the actual book would have been tedious (and filled with errors).

On the novel front, there’s always To Have and Have Not. Howard Hawks once told Ernest Heminingway that he could make a movie of Hemingway’s worst novel. Hemingway asked, “What was my worst novel?” Hawks replied, “To Have and Have Not,” and Hemingway agreed. So Hawks made the film. It had next to nothing to do with Hemingway’s novel, but is a film classic (“You do know how to whistle, Steve?”)*.

And if the book isn’t well known, you also can do what you want. Look at how Hitchcock changed Psycho, and no one complained except Robert Bloch (who was mostly upset because he got so little money for it).

*Probably the only film based on the work of a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist that had a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist (William Faulkner) as screenwriter.

6

The book, and movie, were called “First Blood.” It was not directed by James Cameron.

“Rambo” was the movie sequel; it was not based on a book.

7

I think it’s fine for filmmakers to change the story to suit the film, but if they make a lot of deviations, I think they should change the name of their movie so that it is different from the title of the book, and in the credits they can put 'inspired by" instead of ‘based on’. And it really ticks me off when they use the author’s name in the title of the movie and then make wild changes from the novel.

8

Ok, I got the director wrong. There was a novel written by Morrell which was a predecesor to the movie. If you have not read it, it is a good story. Morell begins by apoligizing for why the story could not happen as it di in First Blood. I could add spoilers, but you should get the idea if you read First Blood.
Sgt Schwartz

9

My worthless opinion is that the director is obligated, if titling his movie the same as the book, to maintain the same tone, general plot and conclusion as the source material. The most egregious violator of this principle is, of course, Starship Troopers. If they want to take a novel or story and use it as a springboard, then fine, give an “Inspired by” credit and we’re good. But the wholesale raping of a novel to suit the egotistical whims of an overpaid, undertalented director really honks me off.

10

The adapted films of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways) are, IMHO, inarguably better than their source material, despite being highly modified, often to the point of uprooting the characters to a new location or completely changing their motivations. (Schmidt as a lonely, clueless, bumbling widower? Good stuff. Schmidt as a bigoted antiSemite? Unpleasant.) So it’s not always a bad move, and frequently necessary, to diverge from or even dramatically bowdlerize the source material.

Stranger

11

Of course a director and screenwriter shouldn’t adhere blindly and without any hint of their own originality to the book. The old tired arguments about movies and books not being the same medium, etc. etc. are perfectly true, and the director (AND the writer, and the other artists) are talented people in their own right. And you have to condense all the material in the book into a much shorter time, etc.
Yet, for all that, people expect the movie to be reasonably true to the book. They certainly expect to see something close to the book. And if the director and producer didn’t think so, they wouldn’t have purchased the property, right?
There have been quite a few good and even great movies that have been very faithful (although not obsessively so) to the book.

**Gone with the Wind.
The Lord of the Rings.
King Rat
The Harry Potter series
**
There have been other films that were changed from the books, for good reasons and with good results. We’ve had a lot of discussions of them on this Board

The African Queen
Goldfinger
The Great escape

But then there are movies that change characters, incidents, or even the basic tone for no discernable reason. Dune was mentioned above (meaning, I’m sure, the Lynch version), but consider the never-completed Jodorowski version. He had Paul having an incestuous relationship with his mother, Lady Jessica, for no reason that I can see. Starship Troopers has been mentioned (and I come down squarely on the side of those who hate that flick, although I’m fascinated by it – for all the wrong reasons). I, Robot. The scarlet Letter (Demi Moore version). This sort of thing used to be a lot more common in the days of the silents (the sea Beast – Moby Dick with a happy ending! Captain Ahab comes home to his girlfriend!!!) when they had much less time and an audience they considered less sophisticated. You’d like to think we’re past that, but they keep coming up with absurd films like The Jackal.

12

I was really surprised when I finally read The African Queen. It’s really good in its own right.

That was the one with Tituba. She had escaped from The Crucible, and was on the run, lost in the literature of Colonial New England. It was nice of Hester to put her up for a while.

13

There are a few cases to consider. If the book was any good, then it was good for some reason, and you really ought to figure out what that reason was. If the book had great characterizations, then you really ought to make sure that those characterizations make it onto the screen. If the plot is terrific, then you’d be well-advised to stick to it. If you don’t want to keep the best parts of a book, then why are you using the book to begin with? There will, of course, be changes, but if the changes are in the areas where the book already did such a good job, then you have to ask if you picked the right book to base off of.

The other possibility is that the book wasn’t all that good to begin with. I’m not sure why a moviemaker would pick a bad book, but apparently, some do (Hitchcock, for instance, made a habit of it). If the book is bad, well then, of course you’re not going to want to keep all the badness. In that case, change away.

14

It really depends on the book, some have better plots for movies than others.

Fight Club, for example, translates pretty nicely into a movie, partially beacuse it’s a fairly small book with a fairly strong narrative (ie: the narrator keeps things moving rather than letting you stop to look at the wallpaper). There were some things removed to make the plot shorter, but mostly what happened in the book happened in the movie.

Flight of the Intruder, similarly, also followed fairly closely to the book, but tightened up the plot by compositing characters (Frank Allen and Tiger Cole, New Guy and Straight Razor, and so on) and removing various sideplots (the pilots’ ongoing practical jokes on eachother, much of the shore leave) but kept the main plot more or less intact. The only thing that really bugged me about the movie vs. the book was that Callie randomly went from being Chinese-American to being blonde, for no readily apparent reason.

That said, sometimes the book is just too dense or tangled to make a good movie plot. On my list of movies-based-on-books to read is Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck. I’m nervous, cause they apparantly based the movie on all three of the original books (Beat to Quarters, A Ship of the Line, and Flying Colours), when I think that just the first book would be plenty enough for a nice solid movie. Compare to the newer made-for-cable Hornblower movies starring Ioan Gruffudd, where the first four movies were all drawn from the same book, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (though, it IS worth mentioning that Mr. Midshipman Hornblower was essentially a collection of short stories about the same guy, rather than being one big plot).

15

I read somewhere(??) that short stories or novellas make for more successful movie adaptations than novels – they give a basic framework from which screenwriters and directors can expand, rather than massive amounts of characters and subplots that have to be either scaled back or crammed in. Makes sense to me, though the only short story adaptation I can think of right off the top of my head is Rear Window.

The most faithful movie adaptation of a book I’ve seen is Rosemary’s Baby.

16

I came in here to mention “Roemary’s Baby.” In Stephen King’s book Danse Macabre, King (who has quite of history of his works not being adapted well to the screen} calls it the most faithful screen adaption of a book–not only are chunks of dialogue repeated, but even the color of the clothes. Director Roman Polaski called author Ira Levin and asked for the date of the New Yorker magazine where Guy saw the shirt he mentions buying (a very minor incident). Levin admitted that he just made it up, thinking any issue would have a nice shirt advertised in it. But the correct issue for the week in question didn’t.

17

I was just going to mention that one. I read the book about two months ago (I had some time on my hands) and was surprised how closely the movie followed the novel. But there are some interesting differences (How Bond is led to Goldfinger at the beginning, the timing of Jill Masterson’s death, etc.), and Fleming goes into way too much detail about the golf game. Maybe it’s just because I know the movie so well, but I thought all the changes were improvements.

And there’s one specific change in the ending that just defines the whole movie. One of my favorite scenes is at the farm when Bond and Golfinger are talking. James has heard the briefing to the thugs about how they’re going to hit Fort Knox, and he tells Goldfinger why he can’t possibly remove that much gold. The reply is “who said anything about removing it?” The idea of a villain explaining his plot to the captive hero is a major cliche, but here it works. Bond is surprised, and impressed, and so is the audience. Goldfinger is just so pleased with his own cleverness that he has to tell someone. And it ratchets up the stakes for the climax of the movie.

The book has none of that. They’re going to use a nuke to blow open the vault, then just load up the gold and drive away.

Cal, I did a search and didn’t really find any discussion about this one. But you’re right, it’s an improvement from the book, and an interesting one.

18

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen , nominally based on the comic book series, made lots of changes and all of them were disastrously bad. Giving Mina Harker vampire powers actually made her less interesting, and shoehorning Tom Sawyer into the plot made me wonder if the writer or director had ever read Tom Sawyer. Hyde, Nemo and the Invisible Man (who they had to make a different person than in the comic, but still…) were all depicted as straight-up can-do team players; their whole reason for being in the comic book League was that they’re cutthroat bastards who aren’t shy about dirty work.

The movie’s writer, James Robinson, is also a comic book writer and I know he has respect and admiration for the source material, but good God, so little of it showed up on the screen!

19

Plus, he spent several month’s worth of late evenings with the Testors and pallets of toothpicks to make that Fort Knox model and he had to show it to someone.

There’s also something telling about Goldfinger in that Bond is almost completely ineffectual. Save for blowing up the heroin facility in the beginning and (after a long struggle and only with substantial luck) killing Oddjob, Bond really does nothing right, letting himself be captured repeatedly and getting the Masterson sisters killed on the way. His one claim to success–having turned Pussy Galore away from her lesbian tendencies (implied in the movie, explicit in the novel)–is highly suspect by any measure. Bond may think he’s saving the world, but he’s really just as delusional as the megalomaniacs he pursues.

Stranger

20

LXG is an interesting case, because it’s not based on the comic, but just the concept of the comic which writer Alan Moore sold before he finished writing it. At least of few of the deviations in the movie, such as the presence of Dorian Gray, were taken from Moore’s notes, he just changed them in the final draft.

Alan Moore used to have a fairly nonchalant attitude about film adaptations of his work. It got him money, and didn’t harm his original work. However, WB was sued by someone else who claimed that Warner Brothers stole his idea for an all-star team of Victorian heroes, and he specifically accused Moore of being a paid shill for the studio. Moore didn’t take that well at all, found the deposition exceedingly onerous, and took the fact that WB settled instead of defending his honor to be a personal insult.

While he had already sold the film rights to some of his other comic creations, he has since refused anything to do with any adaptation. He won’t accept credit or payment, and became infuriated when DC comics didn’t stop a producer of the film version of V for Vendetta from saying he wrote the comic.

Thus showing how perhaps the greatest genius to ever work in comics is also a big baby. Sad really, since he’s already alienated himself from both major comic publishers, severely hindering his ability to get his work seen in wider markets.