When adapting a book, screenwriters have some horror stories

By Lewis Beale
September 28, 2008

 

 

“BLINDNESS,” Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago’s 1997 allegorical novel about an epidemic of sightlessness that threatens to destroy society, is told in a stream-of-consciousness style that reads like a fever dream. Not exactly “Harry Potter,” straight-to-the-big-screen material

Yet, Don McKellar saw in it a screenplay and Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) saw in that screenplay a film he could direct. And the fact that “Blindness” is now multiplex fodder, with the film opening Friday, is a testament to the willingness of moviemakers to tackle — sometimes against great odds — some of the toughest literary works.

“The more successful the work of art is in the medium for which it was originally created, the more it’s going to resist a translation into another medium,” says writer-director Nicholas Meyer, whose adaptation of the Philip Roth novel “The Dying Animal” was recently filmed as the Ben Kingsley movie “Elegy.”

“The better the book, the harder it’s going to be to find a cinematic equivalent and the more important it is that you should” be able to make an equivalent, Meyer says. “If you try ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ ” he says in a reference to a less-than-stellar 1958 film adaptation, “and you don’t bring it off, you have to go to movie jail.”

In other words, conventional wisdom is that pop novels make better movies because, says Joe Penhall, who wrote the screenplay for a film version of Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller “The Road,” slated for a Nov. 14 release, “pot-boilers motor on plot and story, and film loves plot and story.”

In a pop novel, “the emphasis is on narrative,” Meyer adds, “and if something is pure narrative, it may be a movie traveling under another name. What you are looking for in a book is how to find not the movie but a movie that could be extracted from the book in question. If it is narrative, that’s easier than if the novel has complex thematic or linguistic elements to it.”

Take “The Godfather”: pop-junk novel, masterful, epic movie. Or “Gone With the Wind”: not exactly a literary classic but a bang-up film. And all those detective novels like “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep.” This doesn’t mean there haven’t been successful literary adaptations — “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Oliver Twist” and “Sense and Sensibility” are prime examples — it’s just that cinema history is littered with failed attempts to adapt great works. Like the overblown 1965 film version of “Lord Jim,” with Peter O’Toole; the bears-almost-no-relation-to-the-source-material 2002 remake of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine,” with Guy Pearce; or 2007’s gorgeously produced but leaden film version of “Love in the Time of Cholera.”