Comment by stevenwoo
1 day ago
He says he mainly summarizes plot and that the qualities of the writing are not important. It seems like that would miss opportunities - for instance he didn’t think Vineland was adaptable and didn’t even recognize One Battle After Another as the adaptation when he saw it until the credits rolled. Another example, IMHO Arrival is a beautiful adaptation that improves upon the original short story mostly by addition, or maybe it’s cause Amy Adams is more charismatic than the character in my imagination.
I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole. Also did you watch the movie first and read the story or the other way. I read the story first and then watched the movie with lot of anticipations, and was tad disappointed.
> I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole.
The movie does not miss anything about the difficulties of communication because that is not what the movie is about: it is about motherhood/parenthood, love, grief.
That is the point I am making: how hard communication is, grokking reality as whole are some of the core themes of the story (is what I felt). The movie doesn't focus on these aspects at all, maybe these are hard to adapt in a mainstream Hollywood movie.
'Children of Men' is probably the best contemporary example of this - appalling book that informed a piece of cinema that's basically beyond reproach.
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
Nerdsniped by Starship Troopers, I think it's important to make the distinction there between a direct book adaptation versus "a movie inspired by".
Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.
> [Re: Starship Troopers] The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.
Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption are good examples of the adaptation being an improvement. Then again, adaptations are usually a novel being adapted for a shorter telling rather than a short story being elaborated.
Those are great, but The Godfather is my favorite example. The book is, honestly, terrible. The prose is bad. It focuses almost exclusively on the salacious - does it need to tell us that many times about the size of Sonny's cock? - and enjoys the violence a bit too much. None of the minor characters leave any impression at all. The movie, though, is... The Godfather. It transcends it's source, without transposing or changing anything - in fact, I suspect it's far more faithful to its historical setting than the novel - more fully than any adaptation I'm aware of.
The funny thing about The Godfather is that the movie made the book possible, in a way.
Paramount optioned the novel while Mario Puzo was still writing it. They heard about an early 60-page draft of the book from a literary scout. Mario Puzo was deep in gambling debt and took the option deal because he was desperate for cash. There's a chance Puzo couldn't have finished the book without the deal, because he got a $12,500 advance and would get another $80k if the movie got made.
Paramount announced the option deal in March 1967, two years before the book was published. After it was published they put the movie into production.
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are the credited screenwriters for the movie. Puzo wrote drafts, Coppola revised them. It was Coppola's idea to start the movie with the line "I believe in America", to highlight what he felt was one of the story's core themes. In the book that scene happens a few chapters in.
So yeah, the book was kinda pulpy and schlocky. But it may never have been published without Hollywood backing. And its author was also half-responsible for turning it into a near-universally acclaimed, Oscar-winning screenplay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather#Production
Another pretty famous example is Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. The novel is an ok sci-fi concept, but the film takes it to a whole other philosophical level.
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That’s true, your comment reminded me of The Electric State which maybe 50 pages of drawings with descriptions and the trailer for the movie was unintentionally funny to me like it was a parody and World War Z where I loved the short action packed book which seemed like an easy translation but I was so wrong.
This is very weird to me. Is it that hard to find good fiction that hasn't already been made into a movie, that they need to hire someone else to do it? Is the difference between a good movie and a bad movie the quality of the source material it was based on? Maybe I'm reading this wrong.
The number of bad book adaptations makes me believe this is harder than you'd think. It's really an act of translation; you have to figure out if a book "works" without being able to just say what a character is thinking, without using descriptive lanfuage to imply something, etc.
Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.
Likewise video game -> movie adaptations, it seems to be very hard to do. Or they just don't get it, but that's probably my own bias. Thing is, some games are basically interactive movies, but they still make changes to meet some Hollywood ticklist.
(I am forever salty about Max Payne, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, etc. Max Payne could've worked with 1/10th of its budget (no CGI or famous actors necessary).
I'd imagine you have to read for a particular framework to assess viability. Translating from a literary medium to a visual one is very challenging. Much of the detail in the former will be lost in the latter, like inner monologue, narrative time compression, etc.
There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.
One Battle After Another is a fairly loose adaptation, no?