http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/634043... While I understand this is just one review, and the first I have read on director Ron Howard's adaptation of the Dan Brown novel Angels & Demons, it immediately reminded me of a book I am reading on the art of writing. There is a item in the pages of Robert Masello's Robert's Rules of Writing about film "adaptations" from novels tending not to work as the screenplay is a different beast; a short & stubby one. "Very true", I thought, "how many Gone With the Winds have there been?"
While there are exceptions to the rule, this fact holds water. How many times have we heard "the book was better", or "it was nothing like the book"? (The second quote is often uttered about a film where the filmmakers made a certain smart decision. There are exceptions, of course.)
To wash my hands, at this early juncture, of making any potential or perceived comments on the quality of the film adaptation of Angels & Demons (in all probability I will not bother seeing it anyway), I will go no further than the books-on-film point.
3 comments:
...on the flip side, it was always cynically entertaining to buy those "movie tie-in" paperbacks. How could we pass up the enticement to "read the Bantam paperback" of Grizzly or Beyond the Poseidon Adventure?
However, to your point, I agree, good novels seldom make good movies for the reasons you've suggested. Film adaptations work better when they try not to be so enslaved to the plot of the novel-- invariably much back story or subplot has to be removed for the simplicity of a two-hour movie. Atom Egoyan wisely took liberties with the source novel for The Sweet Hereafter to make it more filmic, and in my favourite example, when they adapted Leonard Gardner's novel Fat City for the screen, they hired the novelist himself to change the text so that it made more cinematic sense. As such, the book and the movie are masterpieces of their separate media.
Further, crummy novels are often great source material for movies. Godard would often be inspired to make films based upon the most obscure trashy pulp which at best had a generic story, so he could run wild with filling the bare plot with his own ideas.
And yet, I have no desire to see Angels and Demons either-- it astounds me that Hollywood is blowing money on this after the disappointment of the previous Dan Brown adaptation, but that is another issue entirely. Plainly and simply, I have no desire to sit through another Tom Hanks-Ron Howard collaboration.
There's that great (almost throwaway) scene in "Manhattan" (?) where Diane Keaton is sitting at the typewriter cranking out a movie novelization... And, of course, Woody's funny condemnation of the form.
Yes, I was thinking of that scene while typing the earlier response. I think one ESR contributor collects movie tie-in paperbacks.
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