I am sure Michael Crichton is not the only author that Hollywood is proverbially shat on, but why do they do this?!
I have heard from several friends that the movie Sphere Sucked because it was so different from the book. Now, I liked Sphere probably only because I have yet to read the book.
One of my same said friends saw Timeline and said “I want that 2 hours of my life back” because it sucked so bad — nothing like the book. I LOVED that book and was eager to see the movie until she told me that.
WHY does hollywood use book titles for their movie that is “based on the book” yet so horribly different?!!?!
What authors have been shat on? I also heard the most accurate book-to-film movie is “The 13th warrior” though the book had a different title…
How about Clive Cussler? No, he doesn’t write good books. But you have to admit, he does write good stereotypical action movies. Yet I think the only book that was adapted was “Raise the Titanic”, and that was back in the 70’s and apparently was quite horrid.
I think a lot of the time people have some kind of fetish for the book and get po’ed when the movie differs in some fashion. As for me, if I’ve already read the book, I like a movie that is a little different, or else I’d get bored cause I already knew exactly what was going to happen :eek:
I think it was Jim Thompson who was asked how he felt about the fact that Hollywood had ruined so many of his books. He pointed to a shelf and said “No they didn’t, they’re right over there”.
Stephen King, obviously. I cringe whenever someone says they loved Salem’s Lot…the movie! How anyone who read the book can feel anything but revulsion for that miscarriage is beyond my comprehension.
I read Sphere and saw the movie and I liked both. The movie wasn’t really that different from the book. There were a few changes, some of them necessary, some not, but I’ve seen many movies that were much less faithful to the book.
Now I hated the book Timeline. I probably won’t see the movie until it comes out on DVD.
In general, I’d agree with the OP, but Michael Crichton is a bad example. He writes books for the express purpose of selling the movie rights to them. (And making a ton of money off the book itself, of course). He’s also a director and producer, remember – he produces “E.R.”, and was director of Westworld, Coma, and The Great Train Robbery from his own book. As he was writing the first Jurassic Park book, he was interviewed and they asked what he was currently working on. He said, “I’m writing what’s going to be the most expensive movie ever made.”
I don’t know why, but that made me lose a lot of respect for him. (It doesn’t make sense; if anything I should respect somebody with enough savvy to be able to make money at every point in the production line.) I used to like his books until I realized how formulaic they all are. Still, Jurassic Park and The Great Train Robbery are pretty good reads.
Sorry, but IMNSHO the book Sphere was awful. The end was the single worst literary copout I have ever seen. What’s worse is that he actually had one or two vaguely interesting ideas earlier in the book, but then threw them away–I got the impression that he wrote himself into a corner and just gave up. This is the one Crichton book I’ve ever read (I was stuck in an airport and was desperate), and I’ve sworn never to read another.
And no, I don’t like Stephen King either. So there.
I agree with Hunter. Crichton writes books with the specific intent of selling them to Hollywood. He gets what he deserves and I am sure he cries all the way to the bank.
Sometimes changes work well, though. As much as I loved Stephen King’s novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, I liked the movie better. And Winston Groom’s “Forrest Gump” was way different from the movie, but, IMHO, both were great!
It doesn’t bother me at all to know that Crichton writes novels with the intention of selling them to Hollywood. I’m sure Hollywood has screwed any number of authors over the years; this seems like a little bit of cosmic karma to me. The guy’s business savvy. Can’t fault him for that.
I’ve only ever read ‘timeline’ and it was really an airport book. Forgot to have a book in my carry-on and picked it up while hustling to the gate.
Seriously, can anything short of burning ruin his books? If ‘Timeline’ is any indication of his writing abilities, then his writing sucks. Formulaic, to say the least, void of emotion, character development and so utterly mechanical in the storytelling, the only reason I kept reading, was that I was stuck on a plane and there wasn’t a movie. The whole book reads like a screenplay, including that stupid countdown, which is a tired cliché, to say the leat, even in movies, but in a book, it was just so incredibly annoying.
Well since Crichton has stunk up the movie screen with some of his directorial efforts like Looker, Runaway, and Physical Evidence and I quit reading his books around the mid-90s when I got tired of his formulaic plots and tissue paper characters, I don’t feel to sorry for him as he cranks out lousy books for scads of money. Films like Rising Sun, Congo, Twister and The Lost World: Jurassic Park written by him or based on his work convinced me I haven’t missed much by not reading him anymore.
You could make a case that Ian Fleming has been shat on the further away from his books the Bond Movies got after his death and even more so as they ran out of his original works to base films on. Now that the Broccoli family has their own process for cranking out Bond movies, it seem like bond in name only.
Most of the movies I’ve seen based on Alistair MacLean novels have sucked, but MacLean was such a straight forward brain candy adventure writer it doesn’t make too much difference. Still they really screwed up River Of Death and not just by putting Michael Dudikoff in the lead.
Personally, I’ve found most Crichton books to be pre-ruined. Even his better works (The Andromeda Strain, The Bionic Man, The Great Train Robbery, Fever) were good action novels and thin on characterization.
Crichton’s science is universally sloppy. It always sounds like he’s vaguely remembering a newspaper article on some hot science topic that he read five years before, but he can’t be bothered to do any research on the topic. He’s also got one theme that he’s used too many times: There Are Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know. How many times are we going to have to hear about a theme park gone wrong?
Not sure how you can “ruin” a Crichton story, as all they seem to be is plot outlines, with no character development, and some hocus-pocus science thrown in.
The San Francisco Chronicle has an article today, (12/06/03), on this very subject; “Whodunit to who ruined it.” (Sorry, I don’t know how to link). How and why some adaptations work, and some don’t.
Sue Grafton used to write screenplays. Now she is a bestselling novelist. She has never given permission for her books to be filmed and as I recall she gives three reasons: 1. She doesn’t need the money. 2. THey usually ruin them. and 3. SHe is held in much greater respect in Hollywood because they can’t buy her.
Htichcock always said he would never make a movie from a great book; he didn’t want to mess with someone else’s masterpiece, he wanted to make his own. I’m sure Dahpne Du Maurier, Robert Bloch, and the others whose work he adapted found this faint praise, but he had a point.
Anyone have a nominee for a movie that was better than the book? How about if we limit it to one where you read the book FIRST?
In that latter category I can only think of one, off hand: A Christmas Story was better than the book it was based on, and I’m a lifelong Jean Sheeherd fan.
Some of Tom Clancey’s books (I know, I know, heretic! were more enjoyable as movies, watered-down as they may have been. More than once while reading Clear and Present Danger I reached some crucial plot twist and said "wait a minute, who the heck is this guy? The books have so many characters, so many sub-plots, and so many technical details that screenplay adaptations have tended to distill out much of what was probably unnecessary in the first place. And, yes, I read the books first.
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I think it was Jim Thompson who was asked how he felt about the fact that Hollywood had ruined so many of his books. He pointed to a shelf and said “No they didn’t, they’re right over there”.
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Posted by Foolonthehill:
And I heard it was Elmore Leonard! Maybe this is one of those quotes that take on a life of their own, and end up being attributed to all sorts of people.
