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Only bad novels make good movies? |
The
Warren Adler E-Sheet 20
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Greetings
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Note:
Certain recipients of this modest and often self-serving tome have suggested that I increase its frequency and sharpen the teeth and acidity of its maw. I've taken this dubious advice largely because it reminds me of the newspaper column "Pepper on the Side", which I wrote back in the mists of time, a compendium of youthful anger, ridicule, arrogance, ignorance,
angst and occasional and unintentional wisdom. It might offer an interesting test on whether age makes one smarter or dumber. |
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The Book-to-Movie Enigma
Every once in awhile when a wonderful novel is adapted to a movie, the punditry gaggle and their snobbish fellow travelers resurrect the ridiculous canard that opines that only bad novels make good movies. A recent article in the
New York Times by a novelist Joseph O'Neill cited Phillip Roth's
The Human Stain, Saul Bellow's Sieze the
Day and John Updike's The Witches of Eastwich as prime example of this phenomena.
Oddly, he then cites
The Witches of Eastwich as a disposable movie of a disposable novel. He apparently didn't like the novel either.
As near as I can interpret Mr. O'Neill's turgid article with its overuse of superlatives and dismissals, a common media disease, the movies referenced are also
The Godfather, which he calls as "too bad a novel to be trampled to death by Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather." On the other hand, he praises
Apocalypse Now as "the greatest twinning of novel and
film." Note the word
"greatest." He goes on to say that Conrad's Novella
Heart of Darkness on which it is based contains "some of the best prose ever produced in English." Best ever, my God. Armed with superlatives, how easy it is to self-annoint oneself an oracle.
O'Neill asks the question: How many of you think of
Kramer vs. Kramer or Sophie's Choice or
The Hours as books first and foremost?"
What he means, I think, is that it is unlikely that the movie versions, however brilliant the adaptations will ever destroy the appetite for the books from which they are made. Does this need explanation?
As one who has been through the mill of Hollywood adaptations of two of my novels, one wonderful, one horrendous, I can offer some personal insight into the argument so clumsily posed by Mr. O'Neill.
In the first instance, be forewarned. Movies are movies and novels are novels. The worth of a novel can only be judged by its individual reader, since it is a one on one communication experience. If it moves, transports, engages, resonates, lingers, inspires, teaches, enhances one's life, it is a good novel. Only in the fullness of time, retrospective and durability, can it be judged a great novel.
What a novel provides for a potential movie adaptation is a ready made, probably original, idea or theme, characters and plot, all hatched from the fertile imagination of novelists. Originality is not the strong suit of movie makers, except in the area of special effects and other manipulative pyrotechnics borrowed lavishly from computer games. In movie terms, the novel serves as an inspirational blueprint for a visual experience designed primarily for the popular culture and mass market.
Thus the imaginative experience of a novel is different than the visual experience of using the novel as a blueprint for a movie. I often think of the movie adaptation as an advertisement for the written novel and note with some evidence that many movies lead people to the books from which they are made.
That said, I would like to rebut the statements made by Mr. Oneill and, I must add, most so-called movie critics, an oxymoron if I ever heard one, on the merits of
The Human Stain, a movie made from Phillip Roth's book about a black professor whose skin color is white enough to pass into the Caucasian population.
Notwithstanding all the psychobabble and carping about this movie and its critical trashing and thrashing it is a movie well worth seeing. It was, in my mind, a perfect companion piece for the novel. I believed implicitly in the characterizations, which is the only logical judgment one can really make about an actors performance. I suspect there was some political correctness, meaning the herd instinct of the moment, that might have prompted the bad press, an opinion that is mostly castigated where it is not ignored.
Another movie trashed by Mr. O'Neill is the adaptation of Saul Bellow's
Sieze the Day. I knew Fielder Cook, the director, who died last month. He was a true Virginia gentlemen with a fine esthetic nose for movie art.
It was
Robin Williams' first dramatic role. Unfortunately, the movie moguls at the time thought it not commercial enough or career enhancing for Mr. Williams' mostly comic image and it was not widely distributed. I believe I saw it on television. Here again, in my opinion it fulfilled all the criteria of a wonderful adaptation, including a remarkable and believable dramatic acting turn by Mr. Williams, never replicated since.
As for
The Witches of Eastwich (Mr. O'Neill's "disposable movie of a disposable novel") I was not moved by it, but then I am a poor judge, eschewing the phantasmagorical. Yet, oddly the writer cites
About Schmidt as an adaptation which he says was carried mostly by the charm of Jack Nicholson, (the star of
The Witches of Eastwich). About
Schmidt, which also starred Jack Nicholson,
was an excellent novel by
Louis Begley but was apparently discarded as a model before the screenplay was written.
Some may find this article (if you have gotten this far) mere trivia in today's uncertain and dangerous world.
Nevertheless, I have one more bullet to fire, the charge that
The Godfather is a bad novel. Notwithstanding my youthful friendship with
Mario Puzo, The Godfather is a seminal novel of great power that has created a world that has defined the enduring soul of what we call the Mafia. Whatever one calls this alliance of brutality and family values it is, in my opinion, a true mirror of our flawed humanity, the enduring fanatical tribal loyalties, the rewards and retributions, the greed and goodness, the coarse and the carnal, the endless internal conflicts within us all.
Perhaps Mr. Roth and Mr. Puzo, explorers of the Jewish and Italian psyche respectively, had much in common. Both dealt with
The Human Stain.
An Unblushing Tease
On this website are the first chapters of all my published books. Obviously, they are meant as "samplers" to draw you into the author's world. (and induce a purchase of the complete content). It is, of course, a blatant marketing ploy. In the interest of convenience I offer here a "sampler of the sampler", a few paragraphs of the first chapters, an attempt to induce you to read the full first chapter and go on from there.
Below are the opening paragraphs of the
Trans-Siberian
Express, a book bought for the movies by the late Sir Lou Grade and Marty Richards (the producer of Chicago) and his partners. Alas, this love story on a train was never made. It would have made a helluva movie.
***
Trans-Siberian
Express
International intrigue and suspense on the world's longest and most exotic train ride.
An early spring sun, all light and no warmth, was slipping behind the
gargoyled, columned mass of the Yaroslav station as the black Zil pulled smoothly up to its main entrance. The policeman posted there stiffened as he noticed the large, official-looking car.
The driver and his companion in the front seat, both small-eyed,
high-cheekboned Slavs, got out and talked briefly with the policeman. Then they returned, pulled several pieces of baggage from the trunk and strode swiftly inside the station. Immediately the second car, a
Chyka, pulled up. Five tall, dark-suited, somber men quickly emerged and fanned out. Two positioned themselves on either side of the entrance, conspicuous in their alertness, while the others walked through the station entrance and disappeared into the converging crowd of people.
Inside the
Zil, Alex Cousins glanced at his watch. It was 4:15. The train was scheduled to leave at five, precisely five, Zeldovich had said confidently.
“They will take care of the details,” Zeldovich assured him.
“Thank you,” Alex responded in Russian. He had no illusions about
Zeldovich.
It had been an uneventful trip from the dacha near
Barvikla. Viktor Moiseyevich Dimitrov, the sixty-nine-year-old General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had been expansive at lunch. His appetite had returned along with his color, and he had stuffed himself with huge portions of black bread and globs of sour cream heaped on top of deep bowls of borscht. The chemotherapy was working, Alex had observed, his doctor’s pride expanding as he reviewed the charted progress and the past six weeks of endless diagnosis, observation and treatment. At best, the disease was tricky, and as cunning as a jungle beast. Acute myeloblastic leukemia was a microscopic war between the proliferating white cells and the rapidly weakening red cells in Dimitrov’s blood. And the reds had been losing. Now
Dimitrov, alert again, was no longer in the depressed manic state Alex had initially encountered.
Read
the rest of the first
chapter and see complete details on purchase
options.
Coming in March:
Children of the Roses
A
sequel to The War of the Roses
The
War of the Roses
The classic story of a nasty divorce.
Preview of the First Chapter
 |
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A cold rain whipped across the clapboard facade of the old house, spattering against the panes. Like everyone else in the bone-damp parlor set up theater style with folding wooden-slat seats, the auctioneer raised his gloomy eyes toward the windows, perhaps hoping the gusty rain would shoot out the glass and abort the abysmal performance.
Oliver Rose sat on an aisle seat, a few rows back from the podium, his long legs stretched out on the battered wooden floor. The room was less than half full, no more than thirty people. Behind the auctioneer, strewn around like the aftermath of a bombing, lay the assorted possessions of the family Barker, the last of whom had lived long enough to make some of this junk valuable.
“. . . it’s a genuine Boston rocker,” the auctioneer droned, his voice cracked and pleading as he pointed to a much abused Windsor-style rocking chair. “Made by Hitchcock, Alford and Company, one of the finest names in chairs.” He looked lugubriously around the silent room, no longer expectant. “Damn,” he snapped. “It’s a genuine antique.”
“Ten bucks,” a lady’s voice cackled. She was sitting in the first row, bundled in a dirty Irish sweater.
“Ten bucks?” the auctioneer protested. “Look at these tapered back spindles, the scrolled top rail, the shaped seat. . . .”
“All right, twelve-fifty,” the lady huffed. She had been buying most of the furniture offered, and it seemed to Oliver that the auction was being held for her benefit.
“The whole thing stinks,” a voice hissed. It came from a veined Yankee face beside him. “The rain’s mucked it all up. She’s got the antique store in Provincetown. She’ll get it for a song and sell it off to the tourists for ten times as much.”
Read
the rest of the first
chapter and see complete details on purchasing
options.
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