Why does Hollywood make movies “based on” books that have extraordinarily little to do with the book? not just simplifying for time or lowest common denominator, but having nothing in common besides a few names and a title?
According to Brandon Sanderson (link lost) and some other guy (link very lost), this comes about when a writer has an original script. Original scripts written on spec barely get purchased in Hollywood (although they do get commissioned), especially from young writers. But book adaptations do get purchased. So writers or producers will find a book that has an element in common with their story, buy the rights, and then write a script with the story they actually wanted.
It is also fairly common for directors/writers to use a book as a inspiration but not care about the specific details because they want to express their own artistic vision. Hitchcock refused to adapt books that he considered ‘masterpieces’, since he saw no point in trying to improve them. When he adapted books (such as Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds) he used the source material as loose inspiration and made the films his own.
François Truffaut: Your own works include a great many adaptations, but mostly they are popular or light entertainment novels, which are so freely refashioned in your own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation. Many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance.
Alfred Hitchcock: Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that. An author takes three or four years to write a fine novel; it’s his whole life. Then other people take it over completely. Craftsmen and technicians fiddle around with it and eventually someone winds up as a candidate for an Oscar, while the author is entirely forgotten. I simply can’t see that.
FT: I take it then that you’ll never do a screen version of Crime and Punishment.
AH: Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.
FT: Why not?
AH: Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.
FT: That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form.
AH: Exactly, and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six- to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.
Alfonso Cuaron also liked the idea of Children of Men (the book) but disliked almost all the specific details, so he used his film as a chance to make all of the changes he wanted to see.
I would have assumed that this part of an essay by Stanley Kubrick was in reference to the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview, imagine my surprise when it turns out to be from 6 years earlier
It’s sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for a film than a novel which is merely good. I don’t think that adapting great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more heavily criticised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it’s good. I think almost any novel can be successfully adapted, provided it is not one whose aesthetic integrity is lost along with its length. For example, the kind of novel in which a great deal and variety of action is absolutely essential to the story, so that it loses much of its point when you subtract heavily from the number of events or their development.
Earlier on in the essay Kubrick suggests the best novels for cinematic adaption are:
....not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters.
That suggestion reflects the context of Tom Ford’s debut film, A Simple Man (which I think is an excellent film). Ford said in an interview about adapting the book to screen:
The book is beautiful, but you’re held captive by George’s thoughts. [in the book] there’s no plot, nothing happens in it. In the book, there are scenes. There’s no plot, but there are scenes. They just don’t correspond at all to what George is thinking. He’s doing the most mundane things, but his thoughts are what is interesting. He’s thinking about other things, not what he’s going through. I had to construct a plot and break it down into three acts, structure it, etc.
I find that last sentence very telling: “I had to construct a plot”. Cinematography is the writing of movement, in the most pedantic etymological sense, pensiveness isn’t very kinetic.
I could go on with a word salad of “show don’t tell” “character is action” yadda yadda
One reason is defensive, against lawsuits. When you license a book or ‘life rights’, you get a defense against someone saying ‘you stole my story’. (See for example Terminator getting successfully extorted by Harlan Ellison.) So they may actually go around and buy the movie rights to things that everyone knows is unrelated just to preemptively buy out any possible lawsuit grounds. While this may be ‘pennies from heaven’ for many writers, it has at least once had rather perverse consequences for one of my favorite writers, R. A. Lafferty, posthumously in creating a tragedy of the anticommons: https://ralafferty.tumblr.com/post/55382042501/49-the-six-fingers-of-time AFAIK, this also explains the bizarre practice of buying ‘movie rights’ for nonfiction reporting; for example, one of the Silk Road 1 movies was based on ‘licensing’ some articles from Wired. Or of ‘licensing’ public domain characters like Sherlock Holmes when you want to make a movie about Sherlock Holmes and are worried about an estate suing you over elements like ‘Holmes showing human emotions’ which are supposedly derived from still-copyrighted stories.
I recently learned that the Starship Troopers movie started out like this.
To quote Wikipedia
Development of Starship Troopers began in 1991 as Bug Hunt at Outpost 7, written by Neumeier. After recognizing similarities between Neumeier’s script and Heinlein’s book, producer Jon Davison suggested aligning the script more closely with the novel to garner greater interest from studio executives.
Mostly name value. It’s why you can get properties like Pirates of the Caribbean, Battleship, and more recently “F1” which despite having 75 years of stories to draw on, I’ve been told has gone for a generic “I don’t do that any more, I’m retired” story.
Is suspect part of it is also the nature of the beast, back in the 1990′s Hollywood studios paid sometimes millions for spec screenplays by the likes of Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas. You would have thought for all that investment they would leave the scripts alone. However sometimes there are practical reasons for changing a script or optioned book—you can’t secure the permissions to shoot a climbing scene on the Eiffel Tower, so you change it to another landmark. Sometimes the actor wants to remove a scene that they think is bad for their brand. However as Frank Tashlin put it:
There’s always been some moron-who usually went by the name of ‘producer’ - who would have to justify his existence, and interfere.
Many of the changes that take a book from the one fans will recognize to something different might be precipitated by a whole chain of people trying to justify their input.
Hmm yes, I love it, but I was thinking—how about instead of fighting in Algiers, they fight in Baghdad. People are more familiar with Baghdad than Algiers.
I remember a very meta passage in Gilbert Gottfried’s book Rubber Balls and Liquor. He explains that a celebrity, even a b-list celebrity like him, doesn’t write a book because they have something to say. As he puts it:
“I’m writing a book because I have a book deal”
″Think of it in movie terms. I was once at a party and overheard these Hollywood types discussing Tom Cruise. One guy said Tom Cruise owed the studio one more picture. Another guy said he had three top directors ready to sign on to the project and a major distribution deal here and abroad. A third guy said ‘Great, so what should the movie be about?‘
Well, it’s the same with books. Some guy set up a book deal for me, so now I have to write it. Nobody said ‘Boy, Gilbert Gottfried is a fascinating intellect. He should write a book.’”
This raises the interesting prospect of someone who had no business writing a book, gets a book deal, that gets optioned by a studio, and then adapted into something that hardly resembles the original work. Staring an actor who didn’t even know he was being shopped for the part.
I always assumed it was so directors could get both the book audience (the fraction who will watch the movie no matter what, as long as it has the book name in the title) to watch the movie, as well as the median movie watcher. It is less money-making if a movie trades the bulk of its audience for a tiny sliver of the leftover book readers (who wouldn’t otherwise watch the movie), since in the grand scheme of things, people don’t really read that much.
Why does Hollywood make movies “based on” books that have extraordinarily little to do with the book? not just simplifying for time or lowest common denominator, but having nothing in common besides a few names and a title?
According to Brandon Sanderson (link lost) and some other guy (link very lost), this comes about when a writer has an original script. Original scripts written on spec barely get purchased in Hollywood (although they do get commissioned), especially from young writers. But book adaptations do get purchased. So writers or producers will find a book that has an element in common with their story, buy the rights, and then write a script with the story they actually wanted.
I think this is the Sanderson post: https://wob.coppermind.net/events/529/#e16670
It is also fairly common for directors/writers to use a book as a inspiration but not care about the specific details because they want to express their own artistic vision. Hitchcock refused to adapt books that he considered ‘masterpieces’, since he saw no point in trying to improve them. When he adapted books (such as Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds) he used the source material as loose inspiration and made the films his own.
(From Hitchcock/Truffaut, quoted here).
Alfonso Cuaron also liked the idea of Children of Men (the book) but disliked almost all the specific details, so he used his film as a chance to make all of the changes he wanted to see.
I would have assumed that this part of an essay by Stanley Kubrick was in reference to the Hitchcock/Truffaut interview, imagine my surprise when it turns out to be from 6 years earlier
Earlier on in the essay Kubrick suggests the best novels for cinematic adaption are:
That suggestion reflects the context of Tom Ford’s debut film, A Simple Man (which I think is an excellent film). Ford said in an interview about adapting the book to screen:
I find that last sentence very telling: “I had to construct a plot”. Cinematography is the writing of movement, in the most pedantic etymological sense, pensiveness isn’t very kinetic.
I could go on with a word salad of “show don’t tell” “character is action” yadda yadda
One reason is defensive, against lawsuits. When you license a book or ‘life rights’, you get a defense against someone saying ‘you stole my story’. (See for example Terminator getting successfully extorted by Harlan Ellison.) So they may actually go around and buy the movie rights to things that everyone knows is unrelated just to preemptively buy out any possible lawsuit grounds. While this may be ‘pennies from heaven’ for many writers, it has at least once had rather perverse consequences for one of my favorite writers, R. A. Lafferty, posthumously in creating a tragedy of the anticommons: https://ralafferty.tumblr.com/post/55382042501/49-the-six-fingers-of-time AFAIK, this also explains the bizarre practice of buying ‘movie rights’ for nonfiction reporting; for example, one of the Silk Road 1 movies was based on ‘licensing’ some articles from Wired. Or of ‘licensing’ public domain characters like Sherlock Holmes when you want to make a movie about Sherlock Holmes and are worried about an estate suing you over elements like ‘Holmes showing human emotions’ which are supposedly derived from still-copyrighted stories.
Weird. It seems “how to train your dragon” is basically like this.
I recently learned that the Starship Troopers movie started out like this.
To quote Wikipedia
Mostly name value. It’s why you can get properties like Pirates of the Caribbean, Battleship, and more recently “F1” which despite having 75 years of stories to draw on, I’ve been told has gone for a generic “I don’t do that any more, I’m retired” story.
Is suspect part of it is also the nature of the beast, back in the 1990′s Hollywood studios paid sometimes millions for spec screenplays by the likes of Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas. You would have thought for all that investment they would leave the scripts alone. However sometimes there are practical reasons for changing a script or optioned book—you can’t secure the permissions to shoot a climbing scene on the Eiffel Tower, so you change it to another landmark. Sometimes the actor wants to remove a scene that they think is bad for their brand. However as Frank Tashlin put it:
Many of the changes that take a book from the one fans will recognize to something different might be precipitated by a whole chain of people trying to justify their input.
Hmm yes, I love it, but I was thinking—how about instead of fighting in Algiers, they fight in Baghdad. People are more familiar with Baghdad than Algiers.
I remember a very meta passage in Gilbert Gottfried’s book Rubber Balls and Liquor. He explains that a celebrity, even a b-list celebrity like him, doesn’t write a book because they have something to say. As he puts it:
This raises the interesting prospect of someone who had no business writing a book, gets a book deal, that gets optioned by a studio, and then adapted into something that hardly resembles the original work. Staring an actor who didn’t even know he was being shopped for the part.
I always assumed it was so directors could get both the book audience (the fraction who will watch the movie no matter what, as long as it has the book name in the title) to watch the movie, as well as the median movie watcher. It is less money-making if a movie trades the bulk of its audience for a tiny sliver of the leftover book readers (who wouldn’t otherwise watch the movie), since in the grand scheme of things, people don’t really read that much.