Tonight we're going to do something a little bit different.
I am about to go into what I like to call Stealth Mode for the next two weekends so I can finish the serious paper I'm preparing for the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Congress in three weeks. I've fallen behind thanks to a combination of work, a cold, and nasty reaction to fish oil supplements that left me feeling like my head had been mashed in a wine press for five straight days, and the only way I can avoid falling flat on my face is to take the next couple of weekends and work on something a bit more serious than the pleasure to be found in bad books.
That means returning to themes I've used before (and will likely use again, God help us all): good books that mutate into awful movies (tonight), and good books with terrible, terrible, terrible cover art (May 5th), followed by a Very Special Diary on May 12th that will miraculously transport you - yes, you, o best beloved! - to Fetzer Auditorium in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for the closest I can get to a simulcast of my groundbreaking paper "Noble, Honorable, and Utterly Unbelievable: The Unsung Influence of Jean-Louis de Pouffe." Regular diaries will resume on May 19th, as I return from what will either be a triumph for the ages or an epic battering with custard pies to pen a diary on bad sports biographies.
So be patient, gentle readers, and know that everything I do, I do it for yooooooo........
The entertainment industry is renowned for screwing up the adaptation of books, whether consciously or not. Even allowing for the differences between print and visual media, truly good adaptations of books are rare. For every Remains of the Day or All the King's Men, there must be a hundred mediocrities like The Virgin Suicides, interesting bits of weirdness like David Lynch's gorgeous but incoherent Dune, or outright failures like The Lovely Bones.
And then there are the others. These are adaptations so bad that one seriously has to wonder just what the director, producer, and scriptwriter thought they were doing. Sometimes it's just good intentions gone awry or bad casting, sometimes it's sheer ineptitude on the part of the adapters, and sometimes it's just plain hubris on the part of a director, star, or producer who thinks they know better than the author of the book, but the results are, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, unique:
Nightflyers, by George RR Martin, was a great, terrifying, novella about a group of scientists seeking a group of aliens called the volcryn. There's a telepath, a starship captain who interacts with his passengers only as a hologram thanks to atrophied muscles, assorted spear carriers who get picked off one by one in the best And Then There Were None Fashion, and a genetically enhanced superwoman, Melantha Jhirl.
Oh, Melantha Jhirl. Bigger, stronger, smarter than everyone else on board, she's gorgeous, tough, has immense appetites for food, liquor, and sex with anyone and everyone on board, and is ultimately the only person left standing. She's amazing, and I remembered her long after I'd forgotten the rest of the story, good as it is.
And did I mention that she's black? And that for some reason that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, the production team, headed by a hack named Robert Collector (best known as Mr. Marcia Strassman before the former Mrs. Kotter divorced him), took this amazing character...
...changed her name to "Miranda"...
...stuck her in the middle of an epically dumb script that took a taut, terrifying story and turned into a bargain basement Aliens rip-off...
...gave the entire cast ridiculous '80s hair, and -
unforgivable, unnecessary, why in the name of sweet suffering Dorothy Day did they do this!
chose Catherine Mary Stewart to play her.
That's right. They took an explicitly large, explicitly strong, and explicitly dark character, and had her played by a slender, doel-eyed blonde.
Do I really need to say more? Or can I simply curl up in my wee bower and sob for a while?
The Seeker (The Dark is Rising) - Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising is the second book in a five book sequence also called The Dark is Rising. This enjoyable fantasy series centers on a group of British children (most notably Will Stanton, the last of the Old Ones who guard the world against evil) who are at the nexus of the fight between Good and Evil. The fourth book, The Grey King, won the Newbery Award, and all are worth reading for their plots, Cooper's brilliant use of Celtic and Norse mythology and British folklore, and wonderfully atmospheric prose.
One might gather from the above that these books are very, very British in a good way, and one would be right. So why oh why did the producers of the film change Will from the 11 year old seventh son of a British family to a 14 year transplanted Californian who just happened to find himself in a British village in time for things to happen?
That's right. Instead of running with Cooper's theme of Will being an Old One because he is so rooted in his home village and its culture, the producers decided that it would be "edgier" to make him an "outsider." They also decided that being a teenager would make him less like Harry Potter "a character in a transition," threw in a gratuitous romance, included some Vikings and their boat for no good reason, threw in a gratuitous local mall, and updated the entire book from the 1960s to the 2000s.
The many, many people who've read the books howled, the critics yawned, and the movie died at the box office, sparing us what this production team might have done with other books in the series like Greenwitch (based on West Country May Day rituals) or The Grey King (based on the Arthurian mythos). Susan Cooper herself, who's written enough screenplays to know that her book would have to be changed, was unhappy but resigned:
"You do have to do violence to a book to make it into a screenplay — the two mediums are so different. But the alteration is so enormous in this case."
True, and some of these changes weren't necessarily fatal. But really, Americans in Britain? Viking boats? Really?
Really????
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne's great book about adultery, repression, revenge, and guilt, has been filmed at least a dozen times. The book's title has become a by-word for a shame of mark, and its heroine, Hester Prynne, has been reworked in film, criticism, and metafiction as everything from a repentant maiden to a proto-feminist. But never, ever, ever have Hester, her story, or the author who gave her life been treated as violently as in this film that is So Bad It Makes You Want to Trash Your TV Set, Scream Your Throat Raw, and Drive To Hollywood to Shove Everyone Involved Into a Trash Compactor.
You think I exaggerate, gentle readers? You think that perhaps, just perhaps, I'm indulging in a bit of hyperbole?
Consider these innovative twists that Demi Moore, aided and abetted by scriptwriter Douglas Day Stewart (who never sold another script), director Roland Joffe (who seemingly paid the Devil for his triumph in The Killing Fields by inflicting this bomb on the world just a year after that cinematic masterpiece Super Mario Brothers), and a cast that included Gary Oldman, Roy Dotrice, Joan Plowright, Robert Prosky, and Robert Duvall (each and every one of whom should have known better), included in her 1995 attempt to portray the defiant Hester:
- Gratuitous Quakers...even though the actual residents of Massachusetts Bay hanged these disgusting heretics instead of inviting them over for tea.
- Lots and lots of gratuitous Native Americans, seemingly to show Hollywood and the world that Moore and her cohorts weren't a bunch of mean white racists like that stuffy old poop Hawthorne.
- Gary Oldman as Hester's lover Rev. Dimmesdale, and despite constant efforts to make him hunky (long silky hair! a nearly trimmed beard! steamy love scenes! a nude swimming scene in a pristine mountain stream even though there are no mountains in coastal Massachusetts!), he's about as sexy and tormented as a doorstop.
- A totally, and I do mean totally, gratuitous white-man-disguised-as-a-Wampanoag scene involving Robert Duvall (Roger Chillingworth) using his subtle acting technique to scalp a white man and then SCREAM VERY VERY LOUDLY while covered in blood to show what a savage his wife's betrayal has forced him to become.
- A climactic near-massacre of the Wampanoags that provokes Duvall's character to hang himself, which in turn provokes Oldman's character to offer himself for execution, which in turn provokes the Wampanoags to help save the hunky white dude, Hester, and their daughter.
- A happy ending (YES REALLY A HAPPY ENDING SWEET DEAR CHRIST ON ICE DOING A QUADRUPLE TOE LOOP DRESSED AS YOGI BEAR) where Hester and the Rev. get married, leave town in a surrey with a fringe on top wagon, and drop that nasty old Scarlet Letter in the dust.
The only reasons to watch this savaging of an American classic are a) the costumes, which are gorgeous and sometimes even accurate, and b) the dark, dramatic score by John Barry, which was so much better than the movie that it's a shame that Eon Productions hasn't managed to get the rights so they can use it as the basis for the next James Bond soundtrack. The movie, which Moore claimed was so different from the book "because few people have read it," was itself savaged by the critics (14% on Rotten Tomatoes!) and died a quick and merciful death at the box office. It has become a by-word for cinematic overreach and book-mangling, and is one of the films that marked the descent of Demi Moore from respected actress to Hollywood joke.
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The above are far from the only good books destroyed by Hollywood. Herewith are a quartet that deserved so very, very much better:
Stuart Little - E.B. White's lovely dream fable about a small person who happens to look just like a mouse (but isn't) is turned into an animated/live action film with only the vaguest resemblance to the book. Michael J. Fox, Geena Davis, Hugh Laurie, Nathan Lane, and the rest of the cast are charming, and the special effects and animation are excellent, but this movie is about as true to the book as the legendary Nahum Tate version of King Lear where Cordelia and Edgar get married, Lear is restored to his throne, and everyone lives happily ever after.
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov's collection of short stories is one of the seminal works of science fiction's so-called Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s. It was considered unfilmable for years, despite a brilliant script by Harlan Ellison and Asimov himself, until Will Smith expressed interest a few years back in yet another vehicle to add to his reputation as Mr. Fourth of July. The resulting film was a profitable, good looking, action-crammed success that made lots of money for Will Smith and his producers, but the only things it kept from Asimov's book were a few character names and the Three Laws of Robotics. Little wonder; the script was actually a heavily reworked version of a non-related screenplay called Hardwired by one Jeff Vintar, who's made a name for writing allegedly edgy scripts that somehow never quite make it into production....
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima's very, very, very Japanese book somehow became a way to employ Sarah Miles (who deserved better), Kris Kristofferson (who should have known better), and the gorgeous and scenic Devon coastline (which the producers should have used better). Lots of explicit sex, violence against animals so realistic that the producers voluntarily tacked on a "no real animals were harmed" disclaimer so audiences would realize that no, they didn't actually blow up a seagull and vivisect a poor kittycat, and a pack of demented children who do unto Kristofferson as they did unto their feline victim combined to create a moody, atmospheric mess that was about as Japanese as a Ballpark Frank with wasabi mayo and a little paper umbrella stuck in the bun.
The Earthsea Series - Ursula K. LeGuin's stunning fantasy novels set on the archipelago world of Earthsea have won everything from a Nebula to a National Book Award. Ostensibly for children, these books have enthralled generations of readers with their lyrical prose, vivid characters, and thoughtful, almost mythic use of magic. They are also among the far too rare fantasies set in a world that is not based on medieval Europe; almost all the peoples and characters are dark skinned and from cultures resembling those of Indonesia and the Phillippines. This did not prevent the geniuses who butchered adapted these classics for a miniseries from casting whites in almost every role, including the lead, Sparrowhawk/Ged, and drastically changing the plot. LeGuin was so upset that she posted the following on her website, and it's hard to blame her:
I can only admire Mr [Executive Producer Robert] Halmi's imagination, but I wish he'd left mine alone... I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien "intended..." Would people think they'd been "very, very honest to the books?"
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And so, gentle readers, what movies has Hollywood based on the shredded remains of your favorite book? Did your child sob uncontrollably at the mess that claimed to be A Ring of Endless Light a few years ago? Did you sob uncontrollably at the sight of Sean Penn attempting to play Willie Stark in the 2006 adaptation of All The King's Men? Or have you been spared the sight of a hopelessly miscast actor trapped in a hopelessly bad script that began as a Book That Changed Your Life? Come gather round the fire and join the wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.....
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