I’m always curious to see how the same story gets told in a book, and then in a movie. Each medium is a kind of storytelling, but their methods are miles apart. Writers build their worlds from words on a page, a black and white code. All of the colors and motion come afterwards, in the mind of each individual reader, building the author’s blueprint into a towering edifice, peculiar to their own imagination. If you and I and everyone else here were to read Oliver Twist, each of us would imagine a slightly different Oliver in our mind’s eye. They’d be quite similar, because Dickens is a powerfully cinematic author, so his blueprints come through loud and clear (compared, say, to Kafka’s faceless characters). But if we each watched David Lean’s Oliver Twist, we would all see exactly the same nine year old John Howard Davies, costumed and lit just how Lean imagined him for us.
This is why, when I want to read a book and also see the movie of it, I’ll always read the book first. So that all the author’s people and themes can develop, at my own chosen pace, to fruition in my mind. That is one supreme magic that books hold: they do not show you a finished conception, they invite you to share in half of the artistic creation. The brilliance of a great writer, of Dickens especially, is how little they need to tell us, to picture a striking character. They plant very few seeds of suggestion, just the crucial ones, for us to grok the heart of a distinct personality.
Can a director take a great book, and then show it to us even more magically than it was written on the page? Or are they better off choosing a second-rate book to film, so that their own embellishment of that theme can surpass the original? Which parts or kinds of storytelling are movies perfect for, so that movies can tell those stories better than books ever hope to?
About half a million movies have been released in cinemas. There must be tens of thousands that were adapted from or inspired by books. So there are at least several hundred movies which are better than their books—if we could definitively measure the comparative worth of tales told in different media.
But we’re not scientists here, we’re just Bookchatting. My two main questions for all of you are:
1) Which stories have you read as books, and seen as movies, and you preferred the movie?
2) Which qualities of art or storytelling can movies realize better than books can?
Here are four tales where I’ve read the book, seen the movie, and I preferred the movie. Also, why I did.
Being There by Jerzy Kosiński and Hal Ashby.
Kosiński’s book is a lovely light whimsical tale, and it does what a book does best. It draws a world of light and shadow, and it plays out the mystery around its central character, Chance the Gardener, and how the other characters perceive him. It makes us wonder about people and our social world.
Ashby portrays all that cleverly, with a similar deftness of touch to Kosiński. The novel is slight, 165 pages, and I think Ashby captures all of it in his 130 minute movie. This is a common drawback to movies: there is simply more matter and nuance in a 400 page book than can be reduced into a two hour movie.
Ashby cast the movie well, and Shirley MacLaine et al. all turn in strong performances. What raises the movie above the book for me is, primarily, Peter Sellers at the top of his game. Chance the Gardener is a singular character: an enigma, a simpleton who may also be a mystic seer, who blows up virally on TV in that persona. A character Sellers was born to play. So the movie presents a credible human heart and a complexity of enchantment that Kosiński only hinted at.
Blade Runner by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and Ridley Scott.
Philip K. Dick had a peculiar mind, made more so by his own mental issues and far too many drugs. For a freak, he was very high-functioning; as an artist hungry to publish more, he kept digging into all of his obsessions, until he ripped past reality into other dimensions beyond. His dark twisted paranoid style was immensely influential on SF and many adjacent genres. Even more so a decade or two later, when directors like Ridley Scott (and writers like William Gibson) machine-tooled it into cyberpunk.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has some fine elements that didn’t make it to the movie. There is a wry sense of humor, from the first page, that Scott never attempts. As happens in The Man in the High Castle, the protagonist slips sideways into a parallel LA that they hadn’t known was there, and is shaken up by the trip. Scott is more interested in the machine/humanity questions, and downplays the book’s environmental concerns.
Scott remains faithful to Dick’s main story and world. Dick, who was very wary of Hollywood, watched a 20-minute special effects test reel from the movie, and said "I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." Sadly, he died a few months before Blade Runner was released.
I find most SF movies disappointing—it is so tricky to draw a detailed, convincing world, orthogonal to our own, without leaving big holes in either realism or logic. Scott’s dark timeline of LA 2019 is the most complete and compelling SF world I’ve ever seen. Time Out’s best sci-fi movies of all time list contains a few dozen that are close behind this one.
What I see when I watch Ridley Scott’s The Final Cut of Blade Runner is, Dick’s book set his mind ablaze, and he then worked long and hard (including on his actors) to show an even more vivid and high-res world than the book did. Many directors have visions, but not all of them are this complex or well-integrated, and those that are often fail to shine clearly on the celluloid. Still, I think the starting point for a superlative adaptation is when a director loves the original book so much they aim for a movie that captures the whole story, but also transcends the book.
The Shining by Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick.
Kubrick made one of the most brilliant and scary horror movies of all time. If you’re a fan of terror and madness, you’ve probably already seen The Shining; if you aren’t, then never watch it. But Stephen King famously dislikes Kubrick’s version of his book.
King and Kubrick tell the same story from different angles, but Kubrick wrenches the heart of it into another place. The largest character, played in the movie by Jack Nicholson, is Jack Torrance. He is an aspiring writer, and a recovering alcoholic with anger issues. He accidentally broke or dislocated his son Danny’s arm, and has stayed sober since then. With Jack's wife Wendy, this small family are looking after a huge old hotel in Colorado, empty for the winter season. But the hotel has bad history, and foul spirits.
When I read the book, I was blown away by its visceral power, and it made a King fan of me. I find the movie just a little more impressive. As with the movie of Being There, the whole cast shine, but the anti-hero is a character Jack Nicholson was born to play.
In King’s book, Jack Torrance comes in conflicted, with his own demons, but very much loving his family and determined to become a better man. Then the spirit of the hotel starts to play on him. The engine of the book is the fight between good and evil in Jack’s heart. It is larger than life, but an achingly human story. In Kubrick’s version, that warmth is squeezed out of Jack early on, so that both his heart and the movie’s world are chilling and psychopathic. In the book, Wendy and Danny are stronger and more interesting characters, while in the movie they’re more in the background of Jack’s scenery chewing.
King’s complaint is true: Kubrick loses a lot of the humanity, and the struggle that King built his book on. Kubrick found a story that grabbed him, and then he made it his own. His Shining is a visually dazzling puzzle box, which will drag you by the hair, upstairs and then down into the basement. If you like that sort of ride.
Apocalypse Now by Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) and Francis Ford Coppola.
One of these things is not like the others. With this story, unlike the previous three, Coppola never set out to make a movie faithfully adapting Conrad’s book. Instead, he unearthed the skeleton of an aardvark from a previous century and another continent, then grafted it into a Vietnamese water buffalo. That, I think, is how you make a great movie from a book.
Heart of Darkness is a novella, just over 70 pages long. It’s a great read, and you may well have been assigned it in high school, or a freshman English class. Conrad, through his narrator Marlow, spins his tale with mystery and grace, themes building as it progresses. The white Europeans in Africa see themselves as so superior, but they are just plunderers, and Conrad pushes his civilized men right up against the savages until all distinctions break down, and we see the horror and ugliness in the white men’s hearts.
John Milius, screenwriter, first started adapting Heart of Darkness for a Vietnam War setting in the late 1960s. You know Milius because he directed Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn, wrote the first two Dirty Harry movies (among others), and inspired John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. He wrote the violent and chaotic heart into the movie—but it was Coppola’s vision in the end.
Coppola starts from Conrad’s basic story, but the themes are what drive him, transposed to Americans in the Vietnam war, a century later. There is more to the story, in both versions—but Conrad’s and Coppola’s tellings are both marvelous, and I recommend you (re)read and (re)watch both.
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