I’ve been doing battle with a new composition for choir and orchestra. As of this writing, the score is ahead 2:1 at the half. One thing the composer has been talking about is how the orchestra conductor interprets the piece in different ways, emphasizing some things and modulating others, ways that differ from what the composer’s mind’s ear, generated. The composer finds it intriguing.
The experience got me thinking about interpreting an author’s words after he or she has stopped writing, or when a novel is converted to a TV or film production. We’re muttered and murmured about “that’s not what the book was about,” and “they cast WHO?!? as [character]?” And there are times when someone who loves the material picks it up and builds on it, such as Dave Freer and Eric Flint did with the Wizard of Karrs story. Dave has talked about some gentle changes he made because something the original author implied bothered Dave, but he made that change in a way that didn’t break the story. At other times, well, see the film of “Starship Troopers,” or don’t. You have the title, character names, perhaps the bad guy or bad force, and then the rest is made up from whole cloth. Or you get something like the original Bladerunner, which I find profoundly more fascinating and intriguing than the novel it is based on.
This is not new. If you compare The Eddas and sagas with the Burgundian Niebelungenlied, and those with Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas, you’ll blink a lot. Similar names, some plot overlap, but a whole lot of blending, modification, and less bloody revenge (which is saying a lot, I know.)
The limits of technology and short-form visual story-telling play a role in a number of the decisions made about bringing books to screen. Tolkien fans either love or hate Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. I enjoy the films, and while I’m not in love with how he changed Aragorn and the romance sub-plot (kissy romance, not “Matter of Britain” Romance), they make sense to viewers who are not steeped in Tolkien or medieval literature’s conventions and ideas. The CG, pacing, and other things really worked well, especially in the extended cuts. I had a lot more difficulty with the Beowulf film, because the implied relationship between Grendel’s Mother and Beowulf in the film “breaks” the character, in my opinion. I prefer the original story. Again, this is personal preference, and Beowulf wasn’t the huge silver screen saga that Lord of the Rings was.
A few authors have been so appalled by what Hollyweird did to their stories that they demanded to have their names removed from the film. Or they take the money and sniff that “that’s not the way the story really ends.” (We’re still waiting for that particular author’s version of the rest of the story. I have $5 US down that we’ll never know what he intended, but I might eventually be surprised.)
In some cases, there is no way even with modern CG that the scale of the book can fit the screen, or the complexity of the story be shrunk into a good movie. David Lynch’s vision of Dune mostly works in the long version, but the theatrical cut is very confusing if you don’t already know the plot and characters. I don’t know if the movie series will manage things better. Trying to imagine some of the Honorverse stories shrunk to fit the screen … Doesn’t work for me, although someone might try, or we might get new techniques and technologies that can do it. The Liadan stories are another one that probably wouldn’t do as well on screen. Maybe.
In other cases, the original stories are tamed and polished for popular consumption. Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are rather different from the original stories, or even the French versions. At the time they were released, the originals might have been considered a little harsh for kids. Today? Ye gads, the screams from outraged activists … (Although they also fuss about the role of women in both films, so who knows? And someone would fuss about the use of fur, and about the lack of representative democracy, and …)
In some cases, the films/TV series have a different intended audience in mind than the original books or stories found, or were written/composed for. Heck, sometimes the books and stories we write find a different audience than they were intended for, like the lady who wrote one sub-genre of story and was surprised to sell lots and lots of copies to fans of Amish romance. Why? She had inadvertently hit the “beats” of that second genre, and the readers liked her work.
Mad Genius Club 
33 responses to “How True to the Work: Or Don’t Judge a Book by its Movie?”
aka the bardic process, and it’s been going on since Homer (at least). Us filkers live off of it.
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/when_omer_smote.html
When I was a child reading my first fairytales (from my father’s childhood books), it only gradually came to my attention to wonder about where they came from. The old mines of that material, such as The Matter of Britain or The Matter of France, and the more exotic sources (e.g., The Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights) were unknown to me then, leaving just the shadows of their existence in modern-ish forms. I well remember the outrage when I finally encountered my first variant of a classic story in a children’s anthology, and couldn’t figure out which was the “original” and which was the one I should despise, having no real idea of the sources.
And then I discovered that the Robin Hood corpus-for-kids (working backwards from Errol Flynn…) was actually based on ballads! Not until I started reading Tolkien’s appendices in 9th grade did I finally form anything like a real understanding of where all the originals came from (at least for Europe) and how they had travelled and been modified. At the same time, all the Viking Saga paperbacks came out, and I was in heaven throughout high school. (And had dead languages in college to fall back on when my theoretical Math career died stillborn).
Starting with the traditional tales is still the best way to go, I believe. But we put all “story” into the same bucket of cultural “rightness”, and thus feel strongly about variants and adaptations when they take liberties with what we feel to be originals. I can admire the craft difficulty of translating a story from one language to another, one culture to another, one medium to another, but I can’t like all manifestations equally. The better I understand how that translation works, the less visceral the impact is, and I live for story and its visceral impact (after a fashion). The arguments in writing vs film adaptation are partly craft arguments (how to translate or adapt) and partly cultural betrayal arguments (“That’s not how that character would behave!”) — you can talk about the former in cold professional blood, but god help you if you screw up the latter.
I grew up on Andrew Lang’s fairy tales. Also Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood, and you can trace every single chapter to a ballad.
Films are not books. Books are not films. The mediums are very different. Since beginning the Agatha Christie project (watching ALL her adaptations), I’ve gotten a much better understanding of why some decisions get made.
Casting: Producer’s boyfriend (see 2001 Murder on the Orient Express for Mrs. Hubbard’s explanation (played by Meredith Baxter). Or flavor of the month. Or whoever’s available or cheap.
Time setting: Series are MUCH cheaper when all the stories are set in the same time period. Thus, Poirot is entirely set in the ’30s to reuse sets, wardrobe, accessories, cars, etc. etc.
Compression: One director will emphasize what another won’t which is why it’s fascinating to watch the same film (4:50 From Paddington) four times. They’re all very different.
Handling internal monologues: turn into action sequence? Narrator? Spoken soliloquy?
Cultural differences: French, Japanese, Chinese, Indian adaptations can be very different from the English language versions. The two Russian films we saw were deeply faithful (without being boring which is difficult) but they were … still not English.
Wrong initial decisions: hiring a comedy director. This turns Poirot into Inspector Clouseau in The Alphabet Murders (1965).
A screenwriter’s change is carried through in subsequent versions. See Sue Grafton’s rewrite of Mr. Rafiel’s secretary in A Caribbean Mystery (1983). Or how Margaret Rutherford’s 4:50 From Paddington (titled Murder She Said (1961) gets remade by a French director into a Tommy & Tuppence opus (Le Crime Est Notre Affaire (2008)).
The list goes on and on. I’m much less of a purist than I was.
I feel like I’m more broad-minded when there’s an actual spectrum of adaptations available. The failings of the 1999 and 2007 Mansfield Park stand out alot more loudly than the failings of any particular version of Emma, because there are a total of six surviving “period” adaptations of Emma (counting the Spanish one set in the 1840s…ish) and only three of Mansfield Park.
I will get to see those films! When we finish International Agatha Christie, She Watched, we’re moving onto “Going to the Movies with Jane Austen”. As with Agatha, we’ll watch everything, good, bad, and indifferent. I’ll have to check with Bill that we’ve got the Spanish film, assuming it has English subtitles.
The Spanish versions of Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey, and the Dutch Pride and Prejudice are all on youtube with subtitles. The Italian Pride and Prejudice is similarly available but in an unlisted playlist (first two eps are easier to find); let me know if you have any trouble tracking it down.
If you’re doing contemporary retellings, Kandukondain (Tamil-language Sense and Sensibility) should be available to rent on youtube with English subtitles; I’m less sure where to find Aisha (Hindi-language Emma/Clueless).
Thank you! I’ll pass this along to Bill. He’s compiling the films.
I think my main beef with adaptations is adaptation displacement: I liked Peter Jackson’s LOTR, with a few reservations, when it first came out, and still have a couple of movie images I won in an opening night screening contest framed and mounted in a place of honor at home. I was one of those people excusing most of the changes, even. After twenty-plus years of normies and casual fans thinking that Frodo is useless, Elrond is a jerk, Denethor is a psycho, Saruman is Obviously Evil, and Aragorn and Faramir are Sensitive 90s Men, AND bringing those assumptions to discussions of the books…eh, have made me less tolerant of the LOTR movies’ quirks, not more.
Same with the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, which is somewhat older and alot more faithful to the source material, but belongs to roughly the same generation of adaptations. Liked it a lot at the time, still own a copy and admire what it does right, but nearly thirty years of watching its fans trash every interpretation of Mr. Darcy who isn’t Colin Firth have made me less in love with it.
I’m not invested enough in Starship Troopers or Dracula to be as annoyed with adaptation displacement in their cases,(1) but yes, it is appalling that a lot of normies and casual fans think that the Count is in love with Mina and that the Starship Trooper humans are fascists.
(1) Indeed, I actively welcome Lugosi’s Drawing Room Seducer Dracula and Cushing’s Indy Ploy Van Helsing as fun and interesting Mirror Universe counterparts to the book characters.
I like “Starship Troopers” a lot. The material clearly got away from the director (who famously didn’t finish reading the novel).
It asks that question: What are you going to do?
I like it too, but it wasn’t as earth-shaking for me as some other things I read around the same time.
The director was a small boy in WWII-era Holland, so I guess he has a better Freudian Excuse for seeing Nazis under the bed than most people, but that only explains his Starship Troopers adaptation, it doesn’t really excuse it.
Shrug and wince? Assure people who hate the film/TV that the book is worth reading anyway? Be very careful about intellectual property control if someone wants to option your work, should you ever get there, that is certain.
And make sure your heirs and assigns do too. “Rings of Power” is the Horrible Warning there.
Short of a lot of creativity with wills and trusts, and a very trustworthy literary executor half a century younger than the IP’s creator, I don’t know if there’s a good way of preventing a Rings of Power scenario under current copyright laws. Tolkien’s surviving children were in their 80s or 90s when the rights were sold to Bezos in 2017, and all were deceased by the time the show started airing. However fond of Tolkien the grandchildren were, they were never going to be invested in the legendarium in the same way that their parents, the first hearers of those stories, were going to be.
And even if you and your surviving family are careful about intellectual property control, someone is just going to file the serial numbers off and make Nosferatu instead of Dracula. (And still have an outsized impact on official adaptations – “sunlight FATAL to vampires” starts with Nosferatu IIRC.)
Sue Grafton didn’t want her books optioned for Hollywood. She used to work there and she knew how the sausage was made. Now that’s she’s been dead and gone for a few years, her kids are shopping her books for films.
I guess they need the money.
I have to admit, I have never, ever understood the tendency so many Hollywood adapters of Dracula have of showing Dracula as being I love with Mina and vice-versa. Given that the biggest scene between the two in the book involves Mina getting raped by Dracula — and it’s not even subtle! Poor Mina was in shock and screaming “Unclean! Unclean!” after it happened. How the heck do you get from that to “Oh, Dracula’s love for Mina is pure and untainted”?
It’s Hollywood and that’s how a lot of their relationships ARE?
Most of those scenes proceed from the basic assumption that Mina was swept off her feet by Dracula’s charm real or magical, invited Dracula in some way for a tryst (willingness varies based on sweep method), got revealed, and the way it’s described made rape a reasonable claim, even if she “secretly wanted it.” Since that scenario does happen (see Scottsboro Boys for another alleged example), people buy into it.
After that, she’s either remorseful and helps hunt him down, OR she’s playing a role as a double agent to help him fake his death so her husband will stop chasing him. OR both; that’s also been tried.
It’s not unusual for romance novels….
Actually, it starts with SHE, and similar “seeks reincarnation of lost love” stories in the Victorian era. Then the 1932 Mummy (possibly based on a book) makes the immortal seeking reincarnated lover an undead mummy. Then Dan Curtis, producer of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, borrows the concept for the vampire Barnabas Collins. Samuel Zarkoff then borrows it for Blacula (who, please note, is an African Prince “turned” by Dracula, not Dracula himself). Curtis then recycles the concept into his TV version of Dracula, starring Jack Palance in the title role, which is the first time it is associated with the Count.
There’s a steady blooming of quasi-sympathetic or devil’s advocate films and books about vampires, from this point onwards; Saberhagen’s novel The Dracula Tape might have been drafted before the Palance Dracula was broadcast (was published after), but it postdates the other film/tv examples I’ve just given. The long-range upshot of this trend is Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, Buffy/Angel, The Twilight Chronicles, etc. And of course, the Coppola Dracula with Gary Oldman, which borrows the reincarnated lover thing once again.
I’d never heard of the Jack Palance Dracula.
You didn’t miss much.
So I won’t mind continuing to miss it. 😎
People project a LOT of their own culture onto Bram Stoker’s characters. And a chunk of those projections give me the creeps. (It appears that “vampires” have been a subject of concern in Europe going back to 10,000 years ago or so. Which leads to all kinds of interesting digressions.)
To read a book cultivates the imagination, creates environments unique to the reader, and the characters become personal representations of the writer’s effort to flesh out the character. It becomes a personal experience sometimes ruined by screen plays that fail to present the depth of the original book. With noticeable changes from the original book, the entire plot can be corrupted, which to me, is an affront to the author.
So, turning it around, and reading the book after seeing the movie, is something that takes a strong will to forget the actors in the movie, understanding your original perception of characters may be totally wrong, and honoring the author that may be disgusted by the movie made from their book. It’s worth a try, but disappointment may be the outcome.
Making an adaptation is always going to be fraught. Changes must be made, for all sorts of reasons. And sometimes, different creative directions happen more by happenstance than by intention.
One fairly disastrous adaptation had all the right elements, but failed for a few reasons. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy had a truly wonderful cast. (I admit I was unhappy at Mos Def being cast as Ford Prefect, my favorite character from the books, and the trailers didn’t help, because he looked to be playing the always-manic Ford as laid back. But in the film, if you forget the books and take it on its own terms, his Ford Prefect works and makes sense.)
The people behind the camera loved the book. But they had a problem: the book doesn’t have a plot. It only has a series of incidents, and then stops, with a one-line tease for the next book. A movie has to build to something, climax and resolution, if you want audiences to show up and pay for all those expensive special effects. And while the solution they came up with was suitably weird, it just didn’t work.
The one great advantage for turning books into TV and movies is exposure. I’d guess that for every one person who reads, 100 people go to movies, and 1,000 watch TV.
Filming a book puts the work in front of an audience who’s never heard of it. I met someone who’d never heard of Agatha Christie until he saw Alfred Molina in Murder on the Orient Express (2001).
Similarly, whatever you can say about the quality of the AC films, they keep her in the public eye.
If you’re familiar with Dorothy Sayers and have seen Downton Abbey, ask yourself why the Sayers estate doesn’t license Lord Peter for “Murder at Downton Abbey”.
Because they don’t, Dorothy is vanishing under the great, daily tsunami of books. Enter any used bookstore or thrift shop or library and count the pallet-loads of books by people who used to be household names and are now forgotten.
Do we know if they’ve been asked? Somewhere along the way, the Powers That Be decided that Lord Peter is unacceptably problematic (either because of his title or because they can’t tell that the authorial voice is portraying antisemitism as a bad thing and something one should feel a little superior to the practitioners thereof). Ian Carmichael was too old and chubby for the part when he played it in the 70s, but he had fought for years to make it, and the bigshots were baffled by its popularity when released, and even more with its popularity when it was exported to America (it’s credited with being one of the reasons Mystery! was spun off from Masterpiece Theater).
My apologies for being late in my response but I’ve been out of area. The Dorothy Sayers estate is held, along with numerous other dead, semi-forgotten authors, by a literary agency.
As far as we know (Bill keeps a watch alert on her name), the literary agency clerk who’s in charge does nothing.
In our experience, you need a family member who cares to keep books in print or rights sold. The literary agency clerk’s pay check and view of family aren’t affected so the clerk has little reason to care.
Good point. The last dramatizations I can recall of a Sayers book was on Mystery on PBS back in the, ah, late 1980s, I think.
Yep, starred Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter. (The Mystery! presentation was my introduction to host Vincent Price, who I had previously only known as the cartoon character Rattigan). Rewatched it somewhat recently on youtube. Petheridge wasn’t as good at the humor as Carmichael, but handled the romance pretty well, even if he was in his fifties at the time.
More interesting, I think, are that stories are adapted seemingly without thought as to whether the story works in the new medium.
It has got to be clear to even the densest screenwriter that Lovecraft just does not work in a visual format.
Likewise, there are many authors whose works (like Phillip K. Dick) translate really well to the visual format.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a really good book. The movie, not so much, even though it does have a decent “flirty fight scene”. It’s a shame they completely left out all the ninjas.
Friendly tip: Only read the first book. Avoid the Leftist screechy-preachy sequel.