January 15, 2007
The Unfilmables
While many novels can be almost directly translated to screen, especially pre-20th century novels such as Jane Austen’s gossip columns, more recent novels can prove difficult. There have been bad novels turned into good films (pretty much everything Hitchcock Made, The Godfather), and plenty of dull adaptations of good books (Dune, The Unbearable Bore of Being in a Cinema to Watch This). There’s also a few oddities, such as Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre self-referential adaptation of ‘The Orchid Thief’. But despite the film industry’s frenzy in snapping up adaptation rights, there remains a few novels many fear.
Below are what I consider to be the most difficult novels to adapt, and who, if any, is fit to do that job.
comments
Well, in the spirit of Mary Jeys vis-a-vis the Le Mans racing jacket — “Thank YOU, Andrew.” I only have, like, 101 Important Things to Do today, and here you go posting a link to something that will provide much entertainment and quite possibly offer opportunities for me to wax indignant and get all testy the way I like to do sometimes.
(Say: Maybe I could take a longer look at this AFTER I’ve done my onerous tasks. Hunh. Resist the siren song of diversion at least for a time. It’s a thought.)
I knew you would love the post, Sheila.
I just knew it.
I saw this a couple of days ago. I thought some of the choices didn’t seem especially daunting to me; but then again, I know approximately nothing about the art of film-making.
I don’t know much either, but I hang out with a bunch of folks who do (so I pretend to know what I am talking about).
Knock it off, guys. I got stuff to do. Can’t be diving into this exchange right now — much as I want to.
(So go offline, Sheila, and get your damn work finished. The film/literature/narrative conversation started a while back, and it probably won’t have reached a conclusion before this evening.)
Re the post’s comment about One Hundred Years of Solitude‘s chief difficulty being that it doesn’t have one central character from its beginning to end: That’s not quite true, but we’ll leave that alone for the moment. What IS interesting, though, is film’s apparent implicit requirement that it have a central character or characters, which is something I’d not thought about before reading and thinking about OHYoS’s filmability.
I’m sure there are other instances, but the one film I can think of now that blatantly violates that “rule” is Psycho: what must have its first audiences thought when the film clearly establishes Marion (Janet Leigh) as its central character, only to have her killed off a half-hour into the film, and we’re forced to go along for the rest of film with Norman Bates, of all people? The shower scene’s visual power is undeniable, but I can’t help but wonder if some of its power also derives from having to switch POV horses in midstream, as it were. I’ve not read the novel it’s based on, so I don’t know if the film’s narrative structure follows the novel’s. ‘Twould be interesting to know . . .
I’m sorry, I haven’t clicked through to the article because I’m still stuck on the second line of the quote:
Um, exsqueeze me?
I was wondering if anybody would notice that. He (I assume it’s a ‘he’) is just one of those people, I gather. Why anybody dislikes dear ole’ Jane has always confused me.
India, well said.