I thought that Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions was unfilmable. Then a film was made of it, with some fairly big names no less. I was right- it is unfilmable.
I recently read the book Middlesex and thought it was superb (some parts moreso than others, but all in all). The main character is a hermophradite raised as a girl who doesn’t know that she is actually a he until puberty, whereupon a gender corrective surgery makes him externally what he is already internally. While it wouldn’t be impossible to film, it would be extremely difficult- not only would you have to have an actor who is convincing as both a male and a female, but they would have to be about 15 years old.
I am very eager to see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to see how they handle a few things; they’ll have no choice but to drop a lot of the marginalia, and from the trailer evidently Zaphod’s second head makes an appearance but is usually absent. How they do the superintelligent shade of blue might be interesting.
What are some books you do not believe would ever do well on film?
A Prayer For Owen Meany: They tried to do this as Simon Birch substituting Owen and his high pitched voice for a dwarf. The book itself would be easy, but who would be able to sit through 2-3 hours of Owen’s voice as described in the book?
Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga. Unless is was CGI, it would be extremely difficult to realistically portray some of the weird creatures in the books.
I had high hopes for Francis Ford Coppola’s Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but there were a few too many cooks and the notion that “draggin’ capes make for great drama” derailed it. (The quote above reminds me of the real-life Maria von Trapp’s comment on the film/stage version of The Sound of Music: “It’s a beautiful and inspiring story. It just doesn’t happen to be mine.”
I’ve spent many, many hours wracking my brain trying to think of a way to film Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. The book may be one of my favorites ever, but the themes it deals with are so personal, so deep, that simply “showing” the action may not be enough… so much happens inside the main character. I’d hate to make sacrifices, since there is so much in the book that I feel is necessary towards making a greater whole.
Apart from that, I don’t think anything is really unfilmable. Every time I decide such a thing, someone turns around and does a decent job of it.
Ulysses should be unfilmable, but Joseph Strick, against all odds, managed to make a good sketch which manages to convey the general feeling of the book. It’s no replacement, of course, but it’s a good movie.
When Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was adapted for film, I declared it an impossible feat, because everything that’s important in the book is subtextual and textual. Very little of what makes the book great is found in the dialogue and action. Anthony Minghella made an excellent film, and kept a lot of the subtext intact without resorting to narration, by transliterating it into visual metaphor. It was sheer genius. I was very pleased to be proven wrong, there.
It’s tempting to say that William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is unfilmable. (David Cronenberg, the coward, ducked the issue by not even trying.) David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky might just be able to pull it off, though.
Really, that movie is just an adaptation of the first part of Owen Meany; which is maybe the most filmable part. None of the Vietnam stuff and whatever else was in there.
Of all the books I’ve read lately, and there have been a bunch, I think Ellison’s Invisible Man seemed the most unfilmable.
A lot of great Canadian literature has been turned into a lot of very bad movies. I’m never sure whether that’s the fault of the director, or the impossibility of adaptation. A few I’m convinced should never reach (or should never have reached) the silver screen are The Edible Woman and Surfacing – hell, anything by Margaret Atwood. Anything by Douglas Coupland, too. Just too cerebral.
Another good piece of CanLit I read that would be visually interesting, but probably have to be heavily censored, is The Divine Ryans. There’s so much you can get away with in a book that you can’t in a movie.
Off CanLit, I have never ever seen a good adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, though I’m convinced it’s possible, if the directors could leave off throwing in the big-breasted women, soft-core moments, and buckets of gore.
Lawrence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’ is unfilmable. I heard somewhere there is a version in production, for either BBC TV or the movies, but it makes no difference. Anyone who knows the book will know that while they can, perhaps, portray on screen some of the more conventional parts of the book, it’s impossible to capture the wit, imagination, structure and surreal touches of the book itself in a filmable way.
‘Wuthering Heights’ is also more or less unfilmable. What we get on screen is usually just a heavily truncated version, centring on Cathy and Heathcliff. The actual novel spans at least three generations of two families, and employs a multiple framing structure (a story within a story being told to the narrator) that would be hard to capture on the screen.
‘Catch-22’. Again, its structure defeats any translation to the screen.
The last time I talked to Mr. Coupland, he said he was negotiating with some players about adapting Microserfs for film. I think it could actually make a damned fine film.
I agree with you about CanLit’s generally poor track record when it comes to film adaptations, though. (Disregarding The English Patient, of course.)
It still sticks in my craw that most people’s only experience of Paul Quarrington is that half-assed adaptation of Whale Music, which isn’t one of his strongest books to begin with.
I did see an interview ages and ages ago where he said that. He didn’t seem too disappointed that it fell through.
I’ve heard of Quarrington, but I’m not really familiar with his work. I’ll probably have to read something of his before I go in for my comprehensive exams (specializing in CanLit).
Actually, the movie isn’t too bad… although some might disagree with me.
I’ll also agree with Hamish… I haven’t seen a H.P. Lovecraft story done justice yet, but I think it should be possible. In the Mouth of Madness, isn’t too bad for a Lovecraft related movie.
Unfilmable? Hmmm… how about The Oxford English Dictionary?
I know they’re working on film(s?) of His Dark Materials. The idea makes me ill.
I’ll never understand why people are always excited about a film of Watchmen. It’s a comic book. It is perfectly a comic book, because it is a better comic book than it would be a novel or a movie or anything. That is the point.
A lot of Stephen King’s literature is turned into mediocre movies. The obvious exceptions are: The Stand, The Green Mile, and Dreamcatcher. Thinner sucks on film. One King novel (written as Richard Bachman) that would be difficult to translate to film is The Long Walk. It could be put on film, but it would be boring.
One tale (also written as Richard Bachman) I would LOVE to see translated into film is called Rage. It is permanently out of print and will probably never be filmed because the Columbine kids allegedly got some inspiration from it. If you find it somewhere, pick it up. It’s good.
You forgot Misery and Dolores Clairborne. Those turned out halfway decent, as did Shawshank Redemption.
I think when film makers concentrate on King’s psychological horrors, rather than the ones with the monsters, they do better. After all, the clown in It was much much scarier in my head than how Tim Curry portrayed him.
Actually a friend and I were discussing how one could possibly adapt the more…textual parts to film or TV – perhaps by having voice-overs of the footnotes in the background, or (for example) in the part where Navidson is crawling through the tunnel with the accompanying shrinking block of text (cool it people, it’s not a spoiler), having the borders of the picture grow wider and wider. Or substituting different colour-tones for different typefaces. But really it couldn’t be done.
But maybe it could be done, as far as the story without the complicated textual parts. As a story, it’s pretty linear, and if the movie looked anything like what I had in my brain while I was reading it, it would be creepy and haunting and maybe good.