Comment by eszed
1 day ago
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.
Stalker has an interesting history, because Tarkovsky did shoot the Strugatskys' own screenplay first.
But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.
Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.
I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.
In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.