Letters to the Editor
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Enemies: A Love Story
GREAT book by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stinker of a movie. Before seeing the film, I had read the book at least 10 times. Haven't been able to go near it since.
And the cast was great. Sigh.
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Oh god, so many
Phillip Kaufman made at least two of them, possibly more, I can't rememnber. Pale version of Tom Wolfe's really good "The Right Stuff", awful version of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (I remember a review in the East Bay Express headlined "The Unbearable dullness of Kaufman") and then the worst take on Henry Miller imaginable.
Let's see, so that's three.
I actually liked "A Beautiful Mind" until I read the book, it was shocking how much better the written story was, and how strange the choices were in what they changed.
In that vein "Seabiscuit" comes to mind, for some reason. The book was astonishingly good, and the film only captured a tenth of it.
In fact, it's rare, in my opinion, that a really good book gets made into a really good movie. Kurt Vonnegut, oddly, had it happen twice. I say oddly because you'd think he'd be the hardest to make films of.
However the great grandaddy and champion forever of truly bad films made from terrific books was, has to be, hands down:
Dune.
In a league of its own, that one.
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Wrong format
Recently, I read a quote from a Hollywood screenwriter (wish I could remember who) to the effect that the reason so many adaptations are lousy is that it's almost impossible to make a good movie from a book. It's certainly impossible to film a book the way it's written, and that's the mistake most movie-goers make when they see an adaptation of a book they've read - they expect to see what was on the page. I wish there was some way to disabuse people of this ridiculous idea. I'm sure they'd enjoy the movies far more.
Now a short story, according to that writer, is the perfect form to adapt to a film. That's because when you adapt a book, you're forced to cut and cut and (if it's a long book) cut, but with a short story, you have to create to fill it out, and that makes a good film. Check it out. Rent some films that were adapted from short stories and see how much better they come out.
There's a book called Adaptations, an anthology of short stories that have been turned into films. When I read that book, I was quite enlightened, for all the stories in that book had been made into very good films, whereas most of the books I'd seen filmed had not come out well.
Oh, and I've heard that canard about Unbearable Lightness of Being before, and it stems from that silly idea that a book can be filmed literally. Hogwash, and especially for books like that, which are absolutely unfilmable the way they're written. Kaufmann did something that filmmakers often have to do, which was substitute imagery and feeling for words and thought. UBoL is a very cerebral novel, and those kinds of books are notoriously hellish to try and adapt. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land has been rolling around Hollywood for at least 40 years for the same reason - nobody can think of a way to make a talking-head novel like that work. If you're waiting for a literal translation of UBoL, you'll be holding your breath for a hell of a long time.
Now, if you want to see a book truly massacred, go read E.B. White's Stuart Little. A sweet, gentle, quiet little tome (my own personal favorite book as a child), it was turned into a hyperactive, idiotic monstrosity of a movie. To this day, the thought of that thing makes me want to disembowel somebody. Now, that was a shitty adaptation!
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Beg to differ
Serai1
No, for me the comment about Kaufman's movie was because I hated it, as I did pretty much everything else he ever filmed.
I reject the idea that people don't like movies solely because they don't follow the book literally or faithfully enough, or that movies simply can't be well-made when inspiried by a book.
Some of the movies I really loved took books in entirely new ways, i.e. Slaughterhouse Five, which did an impressionistic version of the movie which relied heavily on the music it was set to, something that of course didn't even exist in the book. It made something entirely different out of the text but it was wonderful. Vonnegut said he sat through it several times, and was the first to claim that he was one of the few novelists who actually had a good movie made of his work.
No, for me it's the *way* it's done, not whether it uses the book as a screenplay or not. It has to do with trusting the spirit of the thing, getting to the essence, translating, really. As any good translator knows, it's a tricky business even when the subject mater is something dry and technical, but it's especially so with a work of art.
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Worst book to movie translation
The WORST book to movie translation has to be Prince of Tides (novel by Pat Conroy). Barbara Streisand jerked that story around until it concentrated an inappropriate amount of attention of the NYC therapist, who just happened to be HER character.
That movie was a mess.
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Persepolis, No Country for Old Men, Lady Chatterley, Control, ...
Of course it's almost impossible to make a good book as pleasant as a film version. You put much more energy into your book phantasy characters, a book has much more time to develop its characters, and so on.
But speaking of recent adaptions there are several good ones, close to perfect:
"Persepolis" is a perfect book, indeed a perfect comic, if not the best comic of all times together with Mouse. It was quite easy to adapt a comic to the movies, and they did it perfectly, making no mistake, leaving nothing out, adapting the view more dynamic scenes perfectly, and putting the "right" music. "Right" is for example an awful interpretation of the author itself of a classic 80ies disco hit, but it perfectly fits.
"No Country for Old Men" is an interesting book, and an interesting if not perfectly adapted and thrilling simple movie. The only drawback might be its too closeness to the book. I speak of the epilogue in the film, which makes we wonder, what the heck should that mean? Is there a deeper meaning or just one old man rambling away. That almost destroyed the book for me.
The better example for a too close adaption ruining the film is a recent hype from France, "Lady Chatterley". Pascal Ferran forgets all about the class conflict and concentrates solely on the gender issues, having warm and tender sex to a stranger - to sum it up. The book is soo much more. More lines, more conflicts, more empathy, more sensations. Especially in the beginning and in the end, where Ferran only takes the 2nd edition without the better ending of Chapter 22. However it will never be able to ruin the book, another near perfect Ken Russel DH Lawrence adaption "Women in love" is even better than the book version.
"Control", based on the wife's book about famous singer Ian Curtis is very close to the book, and wins by doing that. An almost perfect film, with perfect cast, perfect music and perfect images. You might critizise a bit that the film is too close to the book, that no external view to the manchester scene relativises the close view on his life and work.
Just speaking of some latest famous book adaptions. Now with the screenwriters strike maybe even more novels will be adapted more closely, and more boring than the book or a good screenwriters rewrite-dramatization. Which is needed, without any doubt.