For as long as there have been movies, there have most likely been people who insist, with absolute certainty, that the movie is never as good as the book. It’s often an earnest position, one based on the things only a book can give us: the level of detail, the careful character development, the lush or spare or elegant prose.
It would be simpler, and more accurate, to just say that the movie (or the series) is not the book. Not ever. And I would like to propose that we stop asking them to be. Stop wishing for the same thing to happen on page and on screen.
It can’t be the same. Because an adaptation is a retelling.
Last week, in the wake of some appalling adaptation news from the newly renamed Max (they’ve excised the more recognizable “HBO” part), Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk wrote a piece that I immediately bookmarked: “There Is No Such Thing As a Faithful Adaptation.” There are a lot of very quotable bits in this piece, but let’s go with this one: “What if, in fact, faithfulness is a meaningless goal, a quixotic and doomed exercise that’s both creatively bankrupt and almost inevitably dull? What if, actually, faithfulness is bad because it is—stay with me here—impossible and boring?!”
I have, I admit, been a person who once wanted more faithfulness in adaptations. I remember being outraged at the rumors that Arwen would somehow appear at Helm’s Deep in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. I have wanted to see the world that once appeared in my head somehow, magically, transferred to the big screen. But that world isn’t the book, either. It’s just what’s in my head—with all the choices that I made, consciously or not, while imagining it.
A story is a series of choices. Transpose that story into a new medium and it’s a whole new series of choices. How to tell the story, yes, but also who stars in it, and where it’s shot, and which scenes get cut and which extended, and how to present an internal monologue on the screen, and how to light and frame and edit all of these things once they’re filmed, and what the music sounds like, and so much more. These choices are no longer being made by one person—the author—but by a whole team of them.
Every one of them has a part in retelling the story.
Does this seem like a semantic argument? I don’t think it is. We expect different things from retellings. We don’t expect the characters to behave exactly the same way, or the villain to get their same comeuppance—maybe they were just misunderstood!—or the perspectives to match up exactly. The stories of Angela Carter and Kelly Link are not the fairy tales they’re working with. Circe is not The Odyssey. Wicked, though it’s a bit of a prequel, is not The Wizard of Oz.
Just like a movie or series is not a book.
More than that, an adaptation that takes a freer approach to the material is often the better for it. We all have our lists of movies that were better than books; for me, Children of Men is the classic. I read the novel after seeing the movie and was astonished at what the filmmaking team had drawn out of a pinched and dated-feeling book. They made it something new, something fierce and bright and relevant and astonishing.
But what I love best is when the two are their own things. The first season of American Gods is not Neil Gaiman’s novel; it’s Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s interpretation of that novel, complete with an outstanding episode for the underwritten Laura Moon; Mr. Nancy’s incredible speech; and a whole host of other changes and additions that make it into something quite different. As the series went on, it became more tied to the book, less vibrant and inventive, and I mostly kept watching because I love the book and the cast. But it wasn’t enchanting or fascinating in the same way. It didn’t have that thrill of something new, of a brilliant translation across media. Of a retelling.
The Magicians, the series, is not The Magicians, the book(s). It is kind of the reverse of American Gods: The first season hews fairly closely to the plot of the first book, but also plants the seeds for things to hare off in their own directions. The characters become alternate-universe versions of the ones we met in Lev Grossman’s books. The story widens, grows, does things the books never thought of. I love Janet riding her hippogriff in The Magician’s Land and I love Margo pushing a very important button at the end of the series finale. They both need to exist. They don’t need to be the same.
This is not to say, though, that every adaptation ought to run off with the work it’s adapting, or that we have to like strange or wacky choices. We do not have to like the end of Game of Thrones just because it did … whatever that was. Chaos Walking was full of incomprehensible choices—a terrible fate for an excellent book. Amazon’s adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral is certainly doing its own thing—but it’s a thing too interested in violence and cruelty at the expense of Gibson’s fascinating characters, his uncomfortably believable blend of art and capitalism, his take on how the future might shape the past. I find the adaptation hard to watch, and yet I’ll keep watching it, curious what other choices it will make.
Even a show like The Expanse, which at times is very true to the books, makes choices, retells things—for one, in the unforgettable character of Camina Drummer, who does not exist in the books as she does in the series. The two versions of the story feel enmeshed, to me, which is maybe ideal: You can see and feel all the strands that connect them, all the visible and invisible lines drawn from one version to the next, but they exist as their own things. One story doesn’t—can’t—overwrite the other. The unexpected narrative changes in the first season of Shadow and Bone, the series, are a delight in part because I know that things don’t happen quite the same way in the books. It lets me wonder what might happen next, rather than being sure. The uncertainty makes it all feel more fresh.
Buy the Book
The Saint of Bright Doors
(You can maybe tell I’ve been watching a lot more series than films, lately.)
Thinking about adaptations as retellings doesn’t necessarily change anything about them (though I would be curious to know if showrunners or film writers and directors ever approach their material this way). But it can change how we think about them—what we accept or struggle with, what we expect, maybe even what we want out of these new versions of stories we love. If we go into an adaptation expecting familiarity, yes, but not the elusive, impossible faithfulness, what will we notice and love instead? What unexpected combined characters or more detailed plots or invented settings might bring something new to these fictional worlds?
To go back to The Magicians: When the primary cast for the series was announced, I was skeptical. Hale Appleman did not look like Eliot. Why was Janet named Margo? Quentin, okay, he fit the bill, sort of. I had nits to pick in the first season, when the show seemed, mostly, to be doing the book. But somewhere along the way, Appleman’s Eliot became my Eliot. Penny became a thousand times more important than he was in the books. Alice was nothing like I expected. And Quentin was somehow even more Q than his book self.
All of this was possible because Sera Gamble, John McNamara, and their team weren’t afraid to retell the story. To imagine Fillory a little differently; to follow the stories to outlandish, magical, infuriating places; to use the books to set themselves on a trail but then free themselves to see where else it might lead.
A good adaptation, when it retells a story, gives us something new. It’s not a replica, but a whole new work of art. It’s a surprise and, when we’re really lucky, a gift.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
I loved the Netflix adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, and I’m annoyed that the people who screamed that it wasn’t faithful got their way and got the show canceled. No, it’s not exactly like the anime. It’s not supposed to be.
I was a toxic fan after The Two Towers was released. So many things were wrong with these movies (I thought). But then I read a short commentary that explained the idea of thinking of these films as Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the stories, the idea that even Tolkien’s book was just one retelling of a history, and suddenly it all snapped into perspective for me.
An example or two of an adaptation gone wrong, if Molly Templeton knows of any, would have helped me. Some adaptations I have seen feel like they’re trading on a well-known name to tell their own stories. Own your choices!
I watched a video yesterday of the making of Master and Commander, the Patrick O’Brien adaptation. Peter Weir said something rather interesting. He said roughly, “you have a book with wonderful writing, and we pick it up and shake out all the words, leaving just the front and back cover, an outline of the plot, and bare bones character traits. Then it’s up to the filmmaker to replace all those words with images.” I completely understand that movies are a different medium than books, and as such, they HAVE to tell the story differently. The important thing is to stay true to the character’s themes, and storyline of the original source and not contradict it. Something I wish Amazon had considered when doing their Ring series.
While I agree with the article, it is true that not all the choices that the adapters make are good ones.
For example, while I love Jackson’s LOTR, I hated Sauruman and Gandalf throwing each other around Orthanc and Gandalf healing Theoden from an ageing spell. Tolkien’s wizards don’t do much magic and it is for the better. Jackson choose to take the subtlety and mystery away from the wizards and those were not NESSARY changes to the story.
On the other hand, though I didn’t like excluding Gildor Inglorian or substituting Arwen for Glorfindel (it took out two of the few Noldorian charactors), it made narrative sense. It is too much to ask the movies to fully explain the Noldor backstory and they (rightfully) don’t try to.
I wholeheartedly agree and extrapolate this onto the Disney live action remakes.
I don’t think it comes down to just a “faithful rendition” of the book to movie, but more, the spirit and the feeling that sometimes get lost in translation.
Many times, the changes you see, come across as random. For example, in the LoTR movies. For some reason they took the speech Grima Wormtounge says to Eowyn, and they have Aragorn speak it to her. Why? There’s many examples in the movies of just, mixing things up. They don’t hurt the movie if you don’t know the books.
But sometimes, the adaptation actually adds more to it.
Take Good Omens. They kept true to the story, without having to point out everything. It’s never discussed why Crowley’s car is always playing Queen. If you don’t know, it doesn’t take away from the story, but if you know the books, it’s like an Easter Egg. And most of the humor around all CD’s becoming a Queen CD once in Crowley’s car, the humor is in the narrator voice that is in the book. And narration humor in books can be hard to translate into a movie.
But where Good Omens changed, was to really increase the bromance between the two main characters, which elevated what was already there in the book.
Take John Waters’ Hairspray. The movie was fun. The musical kept the spirit of the movie, and added a whole new element. But then the movie of the Musical, lost something.
But take Jaws. The movies is great. The book is kinda average and just ok. There’s not much shark in it. The movie took aspects of the book, and focused on those, giving it a much better focus, and meaning.
Adaptations tend to fail because often, nothing new is being added, and often miss the mark on why the source material was so loved.
The faithfulness of an adaptation should be judged not on adherence to the plot, but whether it engages with the story’s themes. Even films like Starship Troopers and American Psycho, which are repudiations of the authors’ intent, were made by people who got what the original material was about. The adaptations that truly repulse me are things like the 2002 Time Machine film, where no one involved seemed to understand that the story was a satire of capitalism, not just an excuse for cool action scenes.
I think Jackson’s LotR films ended up somewhere in between. Jackson and his writing team understood the broad strokes of what Tolkien was getting at, but they often missed the subtleties, which is why they dropped the Scouring of the Shire.
One of the things that came to annoy me about the adaptation of The Expanse (and I’m speaking as someone who saw the TV show before reading the books) is how they jacked up the friction between the characters. It comes across as a cheap attempt to add tension that ultimately feels artificial. A nice thing I can say is that TV Ashford is more interesting than Book Ashford (who is essentially Frank Burns as a Belter).
One adaptation that I’ve always found fascinating is The Princess Bride. William Goldman wrote both the book and the script. Pretty much every major plot point is preserved between the two. But the two works are nonetheless surprisingly different.
@8. Sean: As somebody who has read STARSHIP TROOPERS the novel and watched the film, I can guarantee you that the film would only be more different from the novel in intent and style if it were honest enough to carry a different name (Mr Paul Verhoven is on record as being completely unable to finish the book and therefore deciding to throw it away, all the better to do his own thing with the film).
My understanding is that AMERICAN PSYCHO is, however, a more faithful adaptation of it’s original.
Chalk me up as a fan who looks for fidelity to the spirit of a work in any adaptation, but also as one who understands that telling the same story in a different medium makes it impractical for a production to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way (to the point where attempting to do so can be actively harmful).
Still, there has to be some level of fidelity to the original, or else why both adapting it?
It depends on how well it’s done.
I happen to disagree about both The Magician and American Gods. Both lost me halfway through their second season because they went on completely baffling tangents –particularly The Magician.
I loved the way Shadow and Bone mixed two different book series in one glowing adaptation, but Season 2, despite its high points, ended up wasting a great villain (who just did not get enough screen time and died way too soon and too easily) and straying all the way into WTF territory. I hope season 3 fixes this somehow.
@@@@@ 12 ED” “Still, there has to be some level of fidelity to the original, or else why bother adapting it?”
THIS
Not to be THAT person, but there is a whole sub-field of Adaptation Studies in academia, which is focused on studying adaptations and is premised on precisely what you noted: that adaptations are retellings, and how you retell a story at a particular moment in time reflects or says something.
The book is usually better, in my experience, but not always; sometimes the movie adaptation is superior. In any event, I don’t judge films on how well they conform to the source material, but by how well they work on their own. I didn’t hate Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy because it took liberties with the story, but because it struck me as bland, clumsy, and self indulgent.
@10 The Princess Bride is an interesting example. A lot of the movie’s dialogue comes from the book nearly verbatim, and the story is virtually the same in both (albeit with rather different framing devices). Yet they’re quite distinct in tone and atmosphere. I think I’m in the minority in considering the novel far superior.
An extreme case would be Blade Runner vs Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie and book were very different. Overall, I liked the movie better (<ducks> as rotten tomatoes and other vegetables are thrown</ducks>).
Nope. I refuse to watch any more dumbed-down, over-hyped, mutilated “adaptations” of great, good, or even mediocre books after what they did to Hermione. The stuff they put on any screen is never as good as my imagination came up with. Who ever thought that a smart practical girl like Hermione would have such utterly horrible hair? Or how about what they did to A Wrinkle in Time, where the smarmiest Chris Pine ever was only the beginning of the travesty? And don’t even get me started on what they did to Pratchett with The Watch; the producers of that should be banned from the planet. I will not risk having any more of my mental images trampled into the mud by money-grubbing philistines.
I think a significant factor in whether or not a person enjoys an adaptation is if the it captures the elements of the story that the person loved most or if it brings enough new joys to outweigh the losses. For example, Ella Enchanted the movie is very different from the book, but since I felt it captured my favorite parts, Ella’s indomitable personality and the spirit of sacrificial love in the climax (even though the scenes were almost nothing alike on the surface), I still enjoyed it. On the other hand, I didn’t enjoy the first new Star Trek movie as much as the original series (not exactly an adaptation but still a new take on an older story) because it didn’t carry over those parts of the characters that I enjoyed most. This isn’t to say it was bad, just that it didn’t do for me what I expected it to and it didn’t sufficiently substitute a new joy for me to latch on to.
Skian@19,
The other thing about Hermione is that she was specifically stated in the book to be, to use a British word, plain, and some of what she was and did clearly followed from that. (And note she did NOT use any spells to change her looks.)
Emma Watson was, and is, gorgeous. I can sorta understand this being a film constraint, but I agree with you that Hermione would likely have her hair in at least a ponytail most of the time (or maybe have a mullet).
I don’t have a problem with reinterpretation, but I DO have a problem where the plot of the original gets lost. (I Robot and the Foundation series, I’m looking at both of you.)
Haven’t read the article yet to comment more broadly, but wanted to affirm this note:
@9: “One of the things that came to annoy me about the adaptation of The Expanse (and I’m speaking as someone who saw the TV show before reading the books) is how they jacked up the friction between the characters.”
I believe I read two books (if not, at least the first one) before watching season one of the show, and my first reaction to the first episode was befuddlement as to why the captain and his crew were changed into jerks who would only answer a distress signal if tricked into, rather than normal people who aren’t perfect but fully committed to a rescue message that would ultimately destroy them.
The later allows the audience to experience horror at their deaths and appreciate how they become space martyrs. The former left me cold as a bunch of jerks bit the dust. Since we never see these characters again, was there a reason they had to become worse than written? What narrative purpose is achieved when the opening shot victim appears to deserve the bullet?
I don’t feel that the later seasons of American Gods hewed closer to the book. All seasons expanded on it, but the first season did so in interesting and inventive ways that enriched the book’s world, whereas the later expansions (with exceptions) felt like clumsily added padding to avoid running out of book-derived plot too soon. Cf The Handmaid’s Tale, which did a fantastic job of building outwards from the book in S1 but, for me, failed at building forwards once it passed the end of the book.
Jackson’s LOTR made some necessary streamlining decisions (Gildor, Tom Bombadil, and Glorfindel didn’t need to be in the movie) but also badly mishandled some characters (Faramir, especially in the theatrical cut; the nonsensically irrational Denethor).
Elves at Helm’s Deep make sense because they represent the other fronts where the Elves WERE fighting without derailing the movie’s momentum to show that. A TV series could have shown us those fronts, even added entire new subplots there; better, shown us the Blue Wizards aiding anti-Sauron rebels in Harad and the East; and kept Tom Bombadil in while they were at it!
A couple of Expanse Season 4 changes to Cibola Burn that rubbed me the wrong way. The drawing a sample from Holden’s eye with a needle squicked me, as I really don’t like eye mutilation. Obviously, that’s a personal thing. The other is the thing they did with the Miller avatar, where he switched between Good Miller and Evil Miller. Again, it’s a needless attempt to create artificial tension that doesn’t add anything interesting. A change I was fine with is how Amos would needle Murtry by deliberately getting his name wrong, which I personally found amusing.
Anyone seen Wheel of Time? Not to be confused with the books of the same name…
For an upcoming Seventies Science Fiction Theme Week at Mutant Reviewers, I recently watched Damnation Alley, which loosely adapts the Roger Zelazny story of the same title. The plot can be summed up thusly: Future Airwolf Star and Future Alleged A-Team Star go on a road trip across post-apocalyptic America in an armored Oscar Meyer Weinermobile. In spite of the derisive termanology there, the Landmaster was actually pretty cool-looking. But otherwise it’s baaaaaaaad. The description of the original Zelazny story (which I have not personally read) sounds much better, or at the very least requires a less intense suspension of disbelief.
@3 “An example or two of an adaptation gone wrong, if Molly Templeton knows of any, would have helped me. Some adaptations I have seen feel like they’re trading on a well-known name to tell their own stories. Own your choices!”
Exactly!!! Especially the changes to suit a “modern” audience and no I can’t think of any right now unfortunately so yep need some help here. Well, they messed up Harriet the Spy. What’s wrong w/ people learning about the ’60s? Even I don’t remember much & I’m a mid-60s kid. People need to find out about different characters and their experiences whether they can relate to them or not.
One example of a poor adaptation is when it changes the story arc of the characters/changes the characters altogether, such as the Little House books tv series, Sullivan’s Anne series, the Potter films (to an extent, particularly Voldemort’s death), and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
There are points I can concur with, such as streamlining if done for an understandable reason. I saw The Age of Innocence before I read the novel, and I can see why Aunt Medora and one of her friends were left out.
And yes, I am so picky about adaptations it’s a wonder I got my dissertation idea from one of ’em–the ’83 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre. I didn’t tell my profs, though, lol.
@21. ozajh
May I be so bold?
Asimov’s Foundation series is one of the driest, most boring SF projects of all time –not to mention that the whole psychohistory, “telepathic immortal robot as a gray eminence” premise is beyond silly. There. I said it. Not a popular opinion, I guess, but there you have it.
The Apple series is not exactly perfect (to put it mildly), but at least it’s entertaining. And it’s visually stunning. (As is Lee Pace.)
#3: Candidate for most spectacularly misconceived adaptation in recent memory: The Seeker, theoretically sourced from Susan Cooper’s landmark novel The Dark Is Rising. The linked Wikipedia article’s tone is deceptively neutral, but makes clear to anyone familiar with the book that the various writers and producers involved at pretty much every stage of development failed to understand their source material. I recall several extremely memorable (and wholly justified) screeds of well-spoken outrage emanating from fans of Cooper’s work on LiveJournal during the final runup to the movie’s release.
#10/#17: The Princess Bride is indeed an example of both an adaptation done really well and one of an adaptation that’s fundamentally different from the source work. Goldman – rightly, I think – realized from the start that he could write a film of “the good parts version” of the original Morgenstern novel, but that trying to fit the framing metafiction itself into that movie would be both impossible and incredibly distracting to 99% of the movie audience. The movie as filmed and the book as written are both first-rate works of their kind – but they are, innately and necessarily, not of quite the same kind as one another. I don’t think either is better than the other; they are, in essence, complementary rather than competitive in nature.
On Tolkien: My enjoyment of Middle-Earth is very much a reader’s rather than a scholar’s; I stopped at the end of Return of the King and am content with that level of knowledge. I didn’t dislike the Jackson movies, but my personal preferences are for the Rankin-Bass adaptations. The animated Hobbit characters are very much my Bilbo and Gandalf and Smaug, and if the animation itself seems old-fashioned today, well, that’s all right in a story that is itself timeless in many ways.
On Disney: The first rule of watching Disney movies should be never to expect them to be either reliable history or close adaptations of their original source material. This is not just a comment on relatively recent material – Pocahontas, Mulan, etc. – but can be applied backwards at least as far as the Davy Crockett television features and Pinocchio. Indeed, Disney has specialized in adaptations more or less constantly throughout its history, in both live action and animation – and some of its most successful screen adaptations have been those which diverge markedly from their source works. See particularly Mary Poppins, The Shaggy Dog and its sequels, Candleshoe, and The Watcher in the Woods on the live-action side, plus a sizeable chunk of the live-action material filmed for TV’s Wonderful World of Disney over the years. Similarly, on the animated side, The Little Mermaid is certainly a modern classic, and I’d submit that the Disney Hunchback of Notre Dame, while absolutely not a faithful rendering of the Victor Hugo novel, is an extraordinary movie on its own nickel, by virtue of powerful music and a supremely complex villain in Frollo.
I get the adaptation argument, but sometimes you can tell that someone who only has a cursory understanding of the story was at the helm. Or they’ve “deconstructed” parts of the story or characters in a way that fans disagree with.
100% it’s impossible to adapt a book perfectly into a film. It has to flow, and can’t have too much exposition, and some book tangents that we love, just don’t make sense on the screen. Like would any casual viewer want watch the whole “Council of Elrond” debate as it’s in the book on screen? Probably not.
Showrunners and director’s can make an adaptation their own, but they have to be logical changes and keep the themes of the story. Otherwise the fans will change the channel.
I’m a recovering purist; at one moment in my life I was deadset against most story deviations. I now accept more adaptive choices as possibilities (going to theatre school and working in the biz will do that for you, not to mention participating in fandom).
However, I think one thing eveyrone’s talking around/about is that an adaptation should not only succeed as a work of art, it should also be (for lack of better phrasing) in conversation with the source material, at the least, if nothing else but as a respectful nod to the shoulders we stand to tell our stories. Everyone certainly has the right to tell their own tale, but not everyone’s required to like it. Metaphorically, if you pull a thread without thinking it through, just to yank on it, don’t be surprised when you tear a hole that needs patching, and further don’t be shocked when people call you on it.
I think what annoys many fans are changes that smack of “needs to change for the sake of it” rather than something that feels part of a larger picture (again, tearing a hole in the fabric). Also, whether a movie holds up isn’t just how well it adapts the story, it also has to actually be an enjoyable experience in its own right.
Examples of poor adaptations that are nevertheless fun, memorable, or possibly great movies include the 1939 Wizard of Oz and 2005’s Pride and Prejudice. Both clearly possess an artistic vision and scope to transport the audience. Both make significant changes to the characters and themes, and while they are not faithful to either, they are clearly made choices in service to something cohesively crafted.
In contrast, I think even casual moviegoers sensed the unfocused direction in the Hobbit trilogy, where each narrative deviation felt more like a grab bag or checklist than adaptive process (even my sister the romantic was unimpressed by the tacked on love triangle). Ditto the hit/miss of Disney movies**: great if they’re entertaining for their own sake, but if they fail at story, spectacle, and adaptation, what do you have left?
** Caveat: I’ll forgive many things Hunchback changed, but not the decision to make Phoebus a good guy romantic lead, considering what a narcissistic jerk he is in the original. **
As to failed adaptations, not just poor ones: to my mind, it’s when a movie completely undermines, rejects, or outright “unearns” its status by a completely misreading of the text. I’ll give a personal example from my theatre past rather than try to name a movie: I once had a director who truly believed the end of To Kill a Mockingbird is about Atticus telling a lie convincingly enough for Scout to believe it, rather than a girl embracing the moral complexities of maturity and agreeing to keep a secret to protect their friend. Nothing about the story had been changed up to this point, we weren’t even changing the dialogue or the plot to provide any justification for this take. It’s doesn’t make any narrative or character sense given the final monologue Scout delivers about her newfound understanding of the world.
Fortunately, the actor playing Atticus knew how to smile, nod, and politely ignore what the director said. In the very strange elsewhere version where such a Mockingbird isn’t a failure, it should at least have some context built in to actually change the story, not just hack at it.
The sweet spot is when a movie is both good on its two legs and as a delimitation of the story we already know. I agree with others that The Princess Bride is a great example: the comedic tone is just right in both despite the details changed. In fact, reading the book years later helped me appreciate bits of the movie I hadn’t previously noticed. Other good examples might be the animated Charlotte’s Web (again, style and tone matter, so that the added music feels as natural to this version of the story as it wouldn’t in the book), the film version of Fiddler on the Roof (which cuts two songs about Percheck from the stage show yet shows what’s he been up to out in the world rather than only sing about, making use of the different medium to both save run time while also contextualizing the character in a more visual way), or Grisham going to Hollywood in Runaway Jury (which changes the industry being sued while still keeping the fundamental ethos/conflict of the novel, employing some film friendly scenework but not distracting from the trial/mystery at the center of the story).
Parody, of course, is an entirely different animal, and one that people largely accept if it’s honestly presented as such.
As a followup: what about books adapted from film/television? These can be hit/miss as well in terms of capturing the source material in a different medium.
Hi, I prefer a not faithful adaption as most adaption never meet what I imagine in my head. Not to say, my imagination is better. Just sometimes different. Also, I hate spoilers. So The Magicians were awesome because they decided to do their own thing while using the bones of the books.
I am ok with most adaptations. That said, I watched the first season of Wheel Of
Time on Amazon and I will not watch season 2. They messed up the story so bad I don’t see how they can get to things coming up through out the (book) series. As bad as WOT is, Wizards First Rule is even worse. Totally unwatchable.
@29 Yes, Mari Ness’ lengthy Disney read-watch on this very site showcases just how wildly different the Disney films are from the stories that inspired them. Almost all of which involved monstrous people doing awful things and which are not at all child friendly.
To my mind the best adaptations are those which distil the underlying essence and themes of the story. Sandman, Jackson’s LOTR, Good Omens, The Last of Us – these are all held up as shining examples of how to redistil and reimagine a highly regarded work into a new medium. The first 3-4 seasons of Game of Thrones should be up there as well.
On the other hand The Hobbit and the Wheel of Time are great examples of how lots of money doesn’t make up for time and getting the production ready before you start. Both are extremely weak adaptations, with both alsosuffering from stunt casting overriding the story. Ironically that’s something Game of Thrones didn’t have – they were happy to have great actors for limited parts, and the actors were willing to play those parts, not play themselves.
One does wonder if this was true for earlier forms of adaption as well. Did fans of Beumarchais’ play The Marriage of Figaro argue about the “faithfulness” of Mozart’s opera? Did fans of Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor argue about the comparative artistic worth of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor? (For that matter, what do fans of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Take think of the changes made in the opera version?)
I remember discussing this on a blog once. What became quickly apparent is that people often preferred whichever version of the story they saw first – e.g. I find The Princess Bride unreadable, but enjoyed the film.
No mention of Dune yet? Concerning the most recent attempt, there’s nothing significantly objectionable. Though it’s quite possible they’ll drop the ball in Part 2. Minor things both positive and negative. The actor for Paul actually looks like a teenager. They feature proper ornithopters, and I’m loving the hummingbird style of propulsion. They also handle the hunter-seeker scene a lot better than the Lynch film or the Harrison miniseries. On the negative side, the Harkonnens so far appear to be badly underdeveloped, and I had the initial impression that Rabban and Feyd-Rautha were going to be made into a composite character. The way the actors failed to wear the stillsuit head coverings when they were in the desert bugged me to no end. I’m not sure about the casting of Christopher Walken as Emperor Shaddam. I see him more as one of the Tleilaxu.
Everyone looks for something different in adaptations. One thing to remember is that with the benefit of hindsight, especially when adapting large multivolume works, the writers and directors of the adaptions can … improve … the pacing and plot choices the author of the original work made.
I love Lord of the Rings but I did not miss Tom Bombadil from the movies. With Wheel of Time, I stuck with the books for 15 years waiting for the end – I’ve read the whole series through twice and counting reading and audiobooks, I’ve gone through the start of the series at least half a dozen times. All that to say I’m that rare WoT fan that is absolutely in love with the Amazon show. The need to condense 15 novels into a realistic 70ish hours of television was always going to require very hard choices and I feel the direction Rafe took the show really distills the series down to the core elements that worked for me all along while adding growth to characters that were very much neglected in the early volumes of the books.
I’ll admit out of my friends that are WoT fans I’m the only one that like the show but I’m certainly glad production is continuing with the start of Season 3 filming already underway!
@37: Dune is an excellent example of how two different adaptations can take on the same source material and both make mistakes and both also do things very well, and they are excellent and poor in different areas.
David Lynch’s Dune is overstuffed and tries to do much with not enough time, but it does set up and execute character arcs very well. Lynch’s film’s mistake was not identifying elements that could be exercised without a problem (i.e. in the film Duncan Idaho contributes nothing and could be cut with zero issues, whilst Feyd-Rautha is given a huge introduction, does nothing, and then dies fairly easily right at the end). But the way it handles things like Duke Leto’s arc, the Baron’s rise and fall and Dr. Yueh’s betrayal is superb.
Villeneuve’s Dune has much more time to work with but weirdly spends too much of that time in slow visuals which are spectacular but contribute little. Dr. Yueh in his version has zero character motivation or setup, and the tragedy and heartbreak we see come through clearly in Dean Stockwell’s version of the character is utterly missing. Duncan Idaho is great, but by casting such a big, popular actor in the role they felt compelled to over-expose the character at the expense of others (Thufir Hawat is very badly sold in the new version as well). They also make the bizarre choice to keep the redundant sequence of our heroes fleeing into the desert twice in ornithopters only to run into trouble, which felt odd in the book and Lynch intelligently removed, but Villeneuve keeps because it allows for more Jason Momoa action sequences.
Obviously the newer film has much stronger vfx and is less randomly obtuse because Villeneuve, arty as he can be, is not Lynch, but it’s interesting to identify the areas where it is weaker than the 1984 movie (or the 2000 mini-series).
There’s a great podcast called Failure to Adapt that discusses retellings. They have episodes about many of the titles mentioned here.
One thing I do when watching adaptations: make sure I’ve read the book a neat while ago so the movie/series can tell it’s own story without the book arguing details all the time. It’s how my head works, this helps enjoying more things. I’ll reread the book afterwards if I think comparing will be interesting.
And yet. I had reread A game of thrones so often this didn’t work, and I loved it anyway, because the few adjustments they’d made in the story made it flow better. Because they’d gotten so many actors right. Because I loved seeing Winterfell. Anyway, that love didn’t last :’)
I agree with anyone that says an adaptation should capture the spirit of the book. Whatever that is, is different for each book, and I’ll look for anything that lets me see what the adaptation took away from the book. I will overlook or forgive a lot. Suspension of disbelief, different story world, all that.
However.
The Will Smith starring movie adaptation of I Am Legend by Richard Matheson I do hate. For the changing of one simple plot point. Which I did not see coming because the movie was a good adaptation up till that point?
Rings of Power had me shouting at the TV ten minutes in. I soldiered through episode 1 and never returned. You cannot take a main character and change the history of a universe and call it an adaptation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to switch the main plot to a character that would allow us to shrug off the shredding of the story already told as being told by an unreliable narrator. I am not interested in arguments about the Silmarillion being a creation of Christopher Tolkien by choosing between a warehouse of his father’s notes.
That said, the Magicians is delightful in both iterations, though I do think the TV adaptation began to torture the storyline. The end was satisfying enough. Good Omens works in both versions very well too.
Now a good word for the Harrison miniseries adaptation of Dune. The one aspect where his version was clearly better than either Lynch or Villeneuve is Baron Harkonnen. A lot of this has to do with the casting of Ian McNeice in the role, who gets the character just right as compared to Lynch’s shrieky loon or Villeneuve’s wad of nothing.
Re Dune:
As far as adaptations go, my vote goes to the miniseries, warts and all. At least they tried, something neither Lynch nor Villeneuve did.
(By the way, “wad of nothing” could describe the entire Villeneuve movie.)
You cannot take a main character and change the history of a universe and call it an adaptation.
But, if I remember, “The Rings of Power” is not an adaptation of “The Silmarillion”, and is in fact legally forbidden from trying to be one, because Amazon doesn’t have the rights to “The Silmarillion”. It is an adaptation of the appendix of “The Lord of the Rings” and various bits of back story scattered throughout the book, and if the writers ever read “The Silmarillion” then they have been very careful to be completely different from it.
In that sense it’s a weirdly unique bit of storytelling, and conceptually very interesting.
35 is a really interesting question and I hope someone knows the answer, because I don’t!
As well as book to opera and play to opera, there must have been hundreds of book to play adaptations… this article https://victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva228.html seems to suggest that London audiences liked their Dickens adaptations to be as faithful as possible, to the point of having the actors freeze on stage when they got to a bit of the story that had been the subject of a print illustration in the book!
There is also the matter of casting, since almost invariably there will be criticism because the actor playing the part does not “look like” the character in the book–an inevitable outcome, since nearly everyone has a somewhat different idea of what a character in a book “looks like” based on the written description.
I’ve read that Clark Gable was effectively shanghaied into the part of Rhett Butler since tons of mail to MGM indicated that he fit the character’s physical description so perfectly, but that he was nevertheless dubious whether his interpretation of the character would live up to expectations.
On the other side, Humphrey Bogart did not resemble the written descriptions of two of his most famous roles: In THE MALTESE FALCON, Hammett describes Sam Spade as resembling “a blond Satan.” And in THE CAINE MUTINY, Wouk describes Captain Queeg as “a small man” with “thin, sandy-blond hair combed over a balding head.”
@47: Another reason for Gable’s reluctance is that he had a very unpleasant experience in the production of Parnell, after which he swore he would never do another period piece.
I enjoyed this, and the many thoughtful comments on it. I’m not a stickler for faithful adaptations because the screen is a very different medium from the written word, but at the same time I believe you have to remain faithful to what people enjoyed about the written work. Most science fiction/fantasy works aren’t popular simply because they build a world that any character could play around in; what matters also is the characters, how they relate to each other, how their journey through the story shapes them, to what degree their behavior is sensible (or why it isn’t), to what degree the people in the story behave like us (or why they don’t), and those elements of the world depicted that resonate because they either speak to us or say something about ours. Even the most fervent fans of a novel will tolerate changes if it builds upon their beloved work (or, in some cases, even eliminates something the author did poorly.) Peter Jackson gets so much credit for LOTR because, even with the changes, some of which were silly, he still brought a beloved world to life for fans of the books and first-timers alike by staying faithful to Tolkien’s vision. The writers of the Rings of Power have not, and haven’t really done enough to justify why we should watch their version of Middle Earth. Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time, Foundation and The Peripheral, are, for me, all examples where the writers have veered from the author’s vision and, for the most part, have eliminated elements of the author’s story without replacing it with something equally compelling, mostly because they’re just not very well-written shows, and many people aren’t inclined to watch a bad show that *also* doesn’t really reflect the source material.
For the most part I would just ask writers to respect the source material enough to realize that they probably can’t make a better story overall, and to ask themselves if eliminating or changing important elements is really in service to bringing that world to the screen.
@1 There is actually a decent amount to like with the live-action Cowboy Bebop. The chemistry with the leads is actually quite good. Given the relatively low budget, they do a lot with a little. The problems usually come when they try to more directly adapt something from the original show, and not do it nearly as well. Would have been better off just sticking to its own thing. Also, the guy playing Vicious was objectively bad. No, it was never going to be as good as the original, but I thought it had potential.
Course, the bigger problem was the long history of bad live-action anime adaptations. The ones that are good can be counted on one hand with plenty of fingers left.
Also, given the tendency to discount animation in the US, a lot of fans get frustrated that it is an excuse to push animation to the side, and that it isn’t viewed as a “real” film unless it is done live action. I get that frustration.
Jean-Jacques Annaud acknowledged this idea by describing his adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose as a palimpsest – something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is far superior to Christopher Priest’s original novel. I read the book after seeing the film and was hugely disappointed.
I feel like I’m the choir to whom the article is preaching to. I’ve long advocated for trying to assess adaptations on their own grounds and have an ongoing friendly feud with a friend of mind who is far more purist than I am about this.
One example that we disagreed with, and then came together on was the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon. The first season was essentially the plot of Altered Carbon. It was not exactly however I always felt Morgan’s antagonist was pretty murky by the end, came out of relative nowhere and was unsatisfying. The visual serial adaptation was tighter and hit the right points for discussing the implications of the resleeving process, the effects on society and individuals alike. Dianna disagreed, and felt they deviated too far for her preferences on the story. Altering the backstory to tweak relationships was a step too far.
However into the second series where they somehow attempted to blenderize the second and third books, while keeping fan favorite characters from the first season I think we both agreed was a massive disaster. The entire point of him sleeving all over the universe necessarily means that there’s a deep disconnect — so there was no reason for Hotel to return no matter how fun the character was in season the first. It was barely even an adaptation, and more of an “inspired by” type of story.
So there’s definitely a threshold for tolerance on these things. The most recent Dune was exceedingly close to the original in dialog, there was a lot of fun in seeing the visual interpretations of certain elements. However even here, a fellow in my book club who is a huge Dune fan seemed rather muted when he commented “the lines were just exactly the same” as if he’d gotten what he wanted, but wasn’t sure he understood why it didn’t hit the same way.
I’m automatically biased against this argument because they sound so much like Hollywood excuses. When promoting the adaptation it’s “Taken from the pages of the beloved best-seller …” and it’s only after the criticism starts it becomes “Hey, different beast!” That aside, a decent argument.
As a comics fan, the creators who decide they don’t want an adaptation being too comic-booky particularly annoy me. Hey, let’s have Julian McMahon call himself “Victor” in Fantastic Four — Dr. Doom just sounds too silly. And so on.
For whatever it’s worth, the adaptation of Algis Budry’s SF spy thriller Who? works better for me than the book. It’s a 1970s adaptation of a 1950s novel and I’m of the age where the movie’s different attitude to the Cold War works much better.
I tend to dislike adaptations where they remove what I love about the book and do not provide anything new to love (or, if they *really* screw up a character and this is what people will be thinking that [beloved character] is like, or if they change a vital message to a false message, then I loathe them).
And many adaptations seem to just be using known names to get more audience for junk movies.
However, I never thought that the Jeeves and Wooster books could be adapted with success – so much is in the particular weird tones of the Wodehouse prose – and yet it was done well and, I would say, faithfully to the general concept of the characters and universe! Somehow! (the spectacular talent of the cast had something to do with it, but it’s still honestly a bit startling how well they did)
So I look at adaptations with uncertainty and suspicion – will this be The Black Cauldron, or will it be Jeeves?
Talk about a total miss. I was one of those fans, though not on LiveJournal, but on IMBD back when it still had discussion areas for the movies there (and on Walden Media & Netflix too, for that matter). I was so disappointed.
As I remember it, though I could be wrong, both the producer and the screenwriter were both quite clear that they did not like the books as written, nor, for that matter, fantasy. A fact which did not help, plus really missing up the Stanton family from the top down, making them Americans (and I say that as an American), totally missing the point of the Old Ones, ignoring all the history Cooper puts into her books and how it plays across the landscape as Will follows his path … sigh. Such an opportunity lost. I wish Masterpiece Theater could do something with those stories. I know that fantasy’s not really their thing, but I think they could do a good faith effort on turning the books into visual media.
Molly Templeton, this is pretty much how I think about adaptations to screen. Your example of one that, unlike many others, doesn’t work is the example I would use. Taking elements of William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral series creates a fanfic story with some new characters, new relationships, which could work but doesn’t. Some of the retained characters are very different, mostly in the direction of being turned into creepy baddies. The emphasis here is on action, much of it unsubtly violent, many scenes feeling a more game-like than thriller in effect. Some of the action doesn’t make sense within the adaption’s own plot terms. The acting and scenic-setting can’t be faulted aside from some silly gigantic statues stuck on top of buildings in future-time-line London. The writing is the problem. As you point out, it looses Gibson’s subtle character work and social/political/psychological exploration. For anyone liking Gibson’s earlier novels and not yet having read The Peripheral, don’t let this series put you off the real thing.
I agree and disagree. I agree that an adaptation cannot be 100% faithful to the source material. A book has too much material for a movie. A series can handle it, but often there’s stuff that just doesn’t translate as well to screen. What an adaptation can do is stay faithful to the characters and the heart of the story. The real problem comes when changes are made that fundamentally alter that. The die hard purists will always complain about every single thing missing (Tom Bombadil from LotR, Harry Potter’s crush on Cho Chang, etc), but where the bulk of fans complain is when the adaptation goes off the rail and doesn’t stay true to the characters.
I think a great example is Captain America: Civil War. The Civil War comic book event spanned many issues over multiple series. The movie couldn’t possibly cover everything, but it stayed true to the core of the story and the characters involved. This is ultimately where The Witcher is falling apart. For those who know the material (including Henry Cavill) they’re increasingly finding it be untrue to the characters and in ways that don’t make sense or are logical. Yennefer always had an almost mother/daughter relationship with Ciri but they made her willing to murder her which goes against the fundamentals of their established relationship.
So yes, an adaptation doesn’t need to be a slave to the material, but it shouldn’t be a fever dream fanfic either.
When adaptations are done well, they are like a 2.0/2nd edition improvement on the originals. I’m perhaps one of the few that liked John Carter of Mars, but I expect that the original will be so offensively sexist and probably colonialist that there’d be no point to reading it.
I’ve heard about the improvements to The Magicians to the point that I’m afraid to read the books even though I totally adore the TV series.
It’s all about which one you watched vs read first though, isn’t it?
@7 I loved the Good Omens TV adaptation and enjoyed Crowley+Aziraphale, BUT Anathema was reduced to a footnote in what should have been HER story. Season 2 is bringing back many of the actors from S1, but not Anathema OR Adria Arjona. Even more than my bitterly mourned excision of the extra Motorcyclists of the Apocalypse is this horrible injustice to Anathema.
I mean “adaptation” is literally in the name.
Re: That Game of Thrones ending, I suspect that wasn’t D&D hiving off in a wacky direction, but rather them trying to be too true to George’s vision. I suspect that that’s the end he had in mind for the book versions of the characters. But the TV show had diverged enough from the book that those endings were a terrible fit for the TV version of those characters.
Wuthering Heights (1939) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) only cover the first half of those books. East of Eden (1955) only covers the second half. It is more important for an adaptation (and it’s an adaptation, not a literal transcription) to be entertaining than to be faithful, although it’s nice to be both. I’ve never understood why people can’t get over this.
The Rings of Power was never going to be faithful because it was an adaptation of appendices, timelines and (more or less) short stories. I personally found the first 3 episodes boring but then it just got better and better. Fidelity wasn’t really the problem.
Thanks for this great article, Molly. I have to agree with @38, I’m in love with Amazon’s adaptation of the Wheel of Time. I’ve been following the series since 1994, re-reading it each time a book came out, and have also read it in other languages, as an aid to learn a second and third language. That is to say, you could call me a “real WOT fan” despite the claims of Bookcloaks that show fans don’t know what real WOT looks like. I love Rafe and team’s interpretation and can’t wait to see what’s in store now that they aren’t dealing with pandemic limitations for Season 2 and Season 3. If only Amazon would announce a Season 2 release date!
And please, WOT fans who don’t like the show, don’t ruin it for the rest of us and get it cancelled. Just don’t watch it if you don’t like it. There’s enough TV out there for all of us– maybe the next adaptation will strike your fancy! Hopefully WOT has the staying power of LOTR and we’ll see plenty more interpretations on-screen. That sentiment goes for almost any adaptation – haters don’t have to burn it all down, they can let others enjoy it and spend their time finding something else they love instead of being mad (sheesh). Variety is the spice of life!
Anathema was reduced to a footnote in what should have been HER story.
Anathema wasn’t in the TV Good Omens at all. There was some incredibly wealthy glamorous American instead, who apparently knew most of the plot from the start. Mary Sue Device, I think the character was called.
I feel obligated to mention Corey Olson and Maggie Parke’s wonderful “Other Minds and Hands” podcast, which is trying to create a framework by which to understand, interpret and appreciate adaptations, especially in context of the Rings of Power Series. It may be a bit academic, but I am loving it.
I am still bitter at Jackson for some of the choices he made in the LotR movies (I think the scouring of the shire not only should have been included, but should have been its own movie; and I can’t forgive him for breaking Faramir.), and am really not a fan of the Hobbit films, but listening to the podcast has helped me get over a bunch of things; yes, the movies were not the books, and that’s the point. The filmmakers had to make decisions about what to include, and what not to include. Some may love this and hate that, and other hate this and love that. It’s impossible to please everyone, and my favourite scene in the Rings of Power (the look of pure joy on Galadriel’s face while she rides) is the most despised scene by many others.
The first Harry Potter was the least engaging and most faithful of the films (and I’m not just saying that because of Chris Columbus, whose Bicentennial Man ranks as one of my least favourite adaptations of all time). As the series went on, the movies took more liberties and became more interesting. Not because of the liberties, but because books and movies are not the same and you have to play to the strengths of both mediums. Which brings us to Tom Shippey’s lecture on the nature of adaptation, found at https://www.swarthmore.edu/news-events/tolkien-book-to-jackson-script-medium-and-message , another fascinating read (or, if you prefer, you can find the audio at the bottom of the page.) So to sum up: if the idea of Tolkien adaptation and the issues around it fascinate you, here’s a couple other sources on the topic.
@22: speaking as someone who hasn’t read the Expanse books yet, I saw the first episode as framing Holden as someone righteous, who will always uphold his own moral code no matter the cost. I didn’t think the captain and crew were jerks per se, it felt more like bystander effect of “not my problem, someone else can deal with it”. But Holden effectively went to great personal inconvenience to respond to that call. It “shows not tells” us what kind of person he is, and made it a lot more believable for me when he continued to stay involved with the mystery when most people would have just tried to pass it on to an authority figure and got on with their lives. I don’t know if this explanation is what the show had in mind, but it definitely worked for me. I’m not going to think twice about that crew and captain, but I constantly question why Holden has to make everything his problem and that first episode effectively establishes it as a character trait/flaw :D
I was just talking about this with a friend! I had pointed out that one of the things adaptations (versus recreations, or “inspired by” do very well is realize that a Book cannot be a Movie. There’s just simply not enough time. There’s things that have to be told that can’t be told the way the book did it, because a movie doesn’t have time to explain to you the things you can read on a page about how the world works. You need to see it working as the characters move through it. A movie is a very different method of story-telling, and you can’t be “faithful” to a book and get a movie right.
The Hunger Games is a great example, because they really paid attention to the book, hit the right notes, and were happy going off on their own where it wouldn’t hurt plot or hinder visual action. Is it weird how Katniss got her mockingjay pin in the movie if you’ve read the book? Yes. But it’s not to the audience who might not have read the book, it works perfectly well. Does it avoid a side plot that barely reaches fruition anywhere in the written series? Yes. That plot doesn’t need to be in the movie, and taking it out gives us more time on screen for the things that did need to be there.
Dune has had three adaptations as many commenters have pointed out, and all three have their difficulties with the source material. All three get some of it “right.” Dune is a (deceptively) intricate story and different directors focused on different parts of it as their anchoring theme for their show/movie, but there’s still the issue of making the story make sense when watched versus read. It just can’t be told the same way.
I love adaptations, although some fail to capture the spirit and points of their source material. I don’t need a recreation on screen; I can just go reread the book for that.
Circling back in after a busy week:
Regarding Disney’s Hunchback: I won’t argue with Michelle’s observations about the animated Quasimodo in #31, mostly because my very strong impression is that the final-form version of Disney’s stage musical adaptation takes the best parts of the movie (i.e. the music) and significantly rebalances the story in the direction of Hugo’s novel. The bad news: evidently there are business issues which preclude producing the stage musical on Broadway. The good news: we have an original-cast CD from the 2015 production in New Jersey, and the libretto/book of that show is license-able for local/regional productions. The unfortunate news (for me): none of those productions have happened in Oregon. There’s evidently an extended run upcoming in Ivins, Utah (!) this summer, however, and I highly recommend the CD.
Now for a handful of cases where I like the movies as well as or better than the associated books:
The Secret of NIMH: The novel by Richard O’Brien (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) is more or less straight science fiction; the movie Don Bluth made from it is – atmospherically, at least – strongly titled toward fantasy. Both versions work for me, not least because Derek Jacobi as Nicodemus sells the fantasy so very, very well.
Candleshoe: I mentioned this early Disney live-action movie briefly upstream. On film, this is a genuinely delightful English treasure-hunt adventure with a truly impressive ensemble cast including Helen Hayes (one of her very last roles), Jodie Foster (one of her first), David Niven (in a dazzling riff on the Peter Sellers shtick of playing half a dozen parts at once), and Leo McKern as a nastier-than-average-for-Disney villain. Any resemblance to the very odd country-house novel by Michael Innes (Christmas at Candleshoe) is sketchy at best. It’s not that Innes is a bad writer, it’s just that the screen story is pretty much a completely different entity.
The Iron Giant: The differences between the Ted Hughes book and the Brad Bird movie aren’t quite as extreme as those of the Candleshoe pairing – the two works start from more or less the same place. But when I tried to wade into the book, I found it darned near unreadable and much pushier about its social-justice agenda, whereas the animated feature’s focus is much friendlier and more character-driven. I am not going to say that the Hughes is a bad book – in particular, as a North American suburbanite, I’m arguably way outside Hughes’ target audience. What I will say is that Bird’s creative choices gave us a really excellent movie that stands up just fine on its own.
Child of Glass: Okay, this one’s obscure; it comes from the period in the 1970s when Disney was mining kids’ books by the vanload for Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday night TV. The film version is centered on Alexander Armitage, whose family is moving into an old Southern plantation-era mansion, and I remember it for its air of genuine spookiness and a nicely vivid prophetic verse. The book, which I looked up later, was Richard Peck’s The Ghost Belonged to Me, and focuses on a certain Blossom Culp, about whom there are also several sequels. But what’s fascinating about this duo is that while the two works precisely flip their protagonist/sidekick dynamics, the plot of both is essentially the same – and this is one instance for me in which the book and film work equally well despite the reversed characterizations.
Now, here’s one on which I’d like to poll the gallery: who here read Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books as a sprite – and what are your takes on all the different screen adaptations (the stage-and-screen musical by Leslie Bricusse, the short-lived Saturday morning cartoon, the films featuring Eddie Murphy and Kyla Pratt, and most recently the Robert Downey movie)?
Another Adaptation in Name Only is the 1951 version of The Lemon Drop Kid. The only points the movie has in common with the Damon Runyon short story is that both feature a racetrack tout known as the Lemon Drop Kid (on account of his fondness for lemon drops) who pulls a scam that spectacularly backfires and a stash of money that goes missing. The big divergence comes from the scam and its fallout. In the short story, Kid convinces a curmudgeon invalid to place a bet on a horse he’s sure will lose and pockets the C-note for himself. Only the horse wins and he finds himself going on the lam. In the movie, Kid convinces a particularly gullible doll (to use the Runyon vernacular) to change which horse to place a bet of two Gs on. Only too late he learns that she was placing it for her mob boss sugar daddy and, not only does the horse she suppose to bet on win, but the one she was tricked into betting on finishes dead last. So he’s given until Christmas Eve to pay back what the mob boss would have won or he’ll face consequences. The thing is there’s nothing particularly Runyon-esque about the movie aside from a few of the minor characters and the frequent use of the term doll. The original story certainly didn’t have anything to do with Christmas. Overall I’m not too bothered, as The Lemon Drop Kid is one of my less favorite Runyon stories. But I don’t see the point of grafting Runyon’s name on what is essentially a Bob Hope movie, since Hope was a big enough name to draw hinders into the theater seats. They should have just not attached Runyon’s name and retitled it All I Want for Christmas is My Two Kneecaps.
@29 Re: The Seeker
Ohhhh I had forgotten about that one. I loved my Dark Is Rising books to pieces growing up and when that so called adaptation came out I lost it. I think I was too young or not tech-savvy enough to be on the internet at the time but I think that started my tradition of yelling at the TV screen. It was sooo terrible and bore absolutely no resemblance to the original book other than “young boy looks for old things”.
A very interesting take. I too have been guilty of grumbling about ‘wrong’ bits in adaptations, so this is a valuable corrective.
Taking LOTR, where I’ve been familiar with the books for decades before the films came out, I did gripe at some of the plot changes, and some of them still seem unnecessary. But I can’t really line up with the complaints about the omission of Tom Bombadil; how did that episode really advance the story in Fellowship?
On the other hand, there’s really no forgiving what he did to The Hobbit. (Or what Lynch did to Dune.)
I’m late to the party here, but I used to be one of those people who got livid about non-faithful film adaptations of books. Then I read an article (sorry, I can’t remember where I found it) by Stephen King addressing the issue of how many of his books/short stories have been made into simply execrable films and what he thinks about it. (I have to give props to King: he cheerfully openly admitted that he likes the money he gets from all the film versions of his work. He’s always been very clear that, while he loves writing and feels compelled to keep doing it, it’s also his JOB and he expects to be compensated for his hard work.)
However, he then went on to say something that has stuck with me since. He said that, money aside, he loves seeing different adaptations of his work because he is excited to learn how other people engage with and understand his narratives and characters. (He was talking about graphic novels and other media besides film, BTW.) King said that yes, sometimes the adaptations just suck. Other times they bring a new perspective to his work of which even HE might not have thought. He finished by noting that his original works are still out there for anyone who wants them and (in general) adaptations don’t “erase” or “destroy” the original text.
Once again, something Stephen King wrote has changed my entire perspective..
For me the issue’s when the people doing the “retelling” just completely lose the heart of the story and use the name and trappings to tell their own tale. Change race, gender, sexuality, who cares? Does it keep the spirit? Update times and locations? Cool! Are the major themes the same?
That’s what ruins a lot of the changed versions for me. One of the best versions of Tristan & Isolde I ever read was updated to modern (1990s) times and featured lesbian protagonists, but it kept the story of their forbidden and tragic love at the core. If they’d called it that and made it a light hearted breezy romcom I would’ve felt robbed.
Late to the party, and haven’t read all of the comments yet, but YES! Long ago I understood that the book was the book and the movie(s) adaptations need to be taken as such. The first Dune was, in many ways, a hot mess, yet it was beautiful, and IMO captured much of what I had loved in the book. OTOH the new Dune part 1 was deeply engrossing and much of the casting a vast improvement – Zendaya is much more the almost feral, self contained and fierce warrior than the lovely but vapid Sean Young. I had similar issues with both the Potterverse and LOTR/Hobbit. Ron Weasely in particular was portrayed as a wimpy coward for most of the series – totally unfairly IMO. The Dwarves likewise appeared to be there for comic relief rather than the fascinating, dignified characters they ought to have been. Adding the girl to The Hobbit and finagling an absurd love triangle was a total waste of our time and suspension of disbelief. Yet I own all of these, and enjoy them (mostly) for what they are – adaptations.
This comprehension got me from Hunt for Red October, through the Harrison Ford series, and into The Sum of All Fears – though I admit I gave up on whatever followed. I had read the books and allowed the screen writers, directors, and actors to create their take on the stories, and enjoyed them for what they were.
Just my tuppence! ;-)
I really wish this discussion hadn’t been hijacked into nearly only about relatively recent adaptations of SF and fantasy works. A few of my favorite film adaptations have been fairly accurate renditions of works in other genres. To Kill a Mockingbird has already been mentioned, as was The Maltese Falcon.
A couple of others: Warner Bros. version of Captain Blood with Errol Flynn is, despite excising a few chapters, remarkably faithful to Sabatini’s novel, right down to dialogue. The same is true of their rendition of Chandler The Big Sleep, a far more difficult work to.adapt and make sense of onscreen.
In terms of television, Spenser: For Hire was such a good version of Parker’s books and characters that I still hear Robert Urich and Avery Brooks in my head when I read the books.
“What if, in fact, faithfulness is a meaningless goal, a quixotic and doomed exercise that’s both creatively bankrupt and almost inevitably dull?”. What if, in fact, retelling someone else’s story and getting all the details and intentions wrong shows best how creatively bankrupt the reteller is? After all, were the reteller actually creative, they’d have come up with their own story and would not have tried to cash in on the popularity of someone else’s creativity.
To go back to The Magicians: When the primary cast for the series was announced, I was skeptical. Hale Appleman did not look like Eliot. Why was Janet named Margo? Quentin, okay, he fit the bill, sort of. I had nits to pick in the first season, when the show seemed, mostly, to be doing the book. But somewhere along the way, Appleman’s Eliot became my Eliot. Penny became a thousand times more important than he was in the books. Alice was nothing like I expected. And Quentin was somehow even more Q than his book self.
I liked the casting choices A LOT, particularly because the characters in Grossman’s novels are ALL SO WHITE. Arjun Gupta made a great Penny. Alice… well, Book Alice is somewhat fragile-looking, and Olivia Dudley was like Brunhilde the Valkyrie with glasses, but it worked, mostly. Margo… why the name change? Was it because too many book characters have names that start with J? Who knows?
My only objection to the casting is Hunky Eliot. Hale Appleman did a wonderful job with Eliot’s tormented nature, as far as I could tell (I only watched a season and a half or so, before all the baffling, out-of-the-blue changes turned me off) but –could they have picked a less distractingly studly actor? He made even Gupta look like the proverbial ninety-pound weakling.
From memory: The ending of “The Rocking Horse Winner” is better in the adaptation. In the story, destroying the check might be regret, in the adaptation, it’s just more extravagance.
I recently reread Good Omens and was surprised to find that one of my favorite parts is not in the book (the switcharoo they pull at the end).