From Page to Screen: Book to Movie Adaptations
Humans love stories in any form. From spooky stories around the campfire to beloved books, films and our favorite shows, we are always ready to be entertained. But what happens when our favorite books get turned into films or a series? That can be a hit or a miss.
When we read a book our imagination creates a movie, of sorts, inside our head. Guided by the author’s descriptions we create a world for ourselves that no one else can see. When we see that story come to life on the screen, we know, intellectually, that our own personal “movie” is not going to come faithfully to life. How can it? The creators of these adaptations have their own inner movies and, for the most part, this is what we see when we take our seat on the sofa or in the movie theater.
For the past decade or so there have been many adaptations of books to the screen. There are many lists of the best of the best when it comes to these adaptations. Emily Temple, writing for Literary Hub, presents one such list in which their staff evaluated films “on their own independent merits.” That is, Temple adds, “while many of us have read the books these shows are based on, we didn’t base our decisions on fidelity to, or creativity of departure from, the original text. We just wanted to pick the best movies.” Check out LitHub’s list of best film adaptations of 2010-2019 here.
OK, It’s Subjective
For many of us, though, simply being a good film is not enough. The characters and the stories we love so well in a book can make or break a film for us if they are greatly changed. It is not uncommon for films and shows based on books to deviate from the literary plot, or to expand upon it, which changes the flavor of the tale and, often, how we feel about it. Our opinions can differ wildly. Screen Rant has its own list of the worst films based on books. Interestingly, LitHub’s list of the best crosses swords with Screen Rant’s list of the worst. Both have the Leonardo DiCaprio version of The Great Gatsby on their lists. But what is most important is how did we feel about it? Did we spend our hard earned money to see it, did we skip it altogether, or did we just go back and read the book one more time because our inner movie is always the best?
Sometimes Even the Authors Don’t Like Them
Each of us, as readers, have strong opinions, but the authors who created these stories have strong opinions too. Though an author has to approve, and sell, the rights to take their written story to the screen, not all authors are happy with the results. From Mary Poppins to The Shining, the authors who penned these stories were very unhappy with the film results, according to an article in Mental Floss. Stacy Conradt writes, “Disney’s Mary Poppins might be a cherished childhood memory for a lot of us, but for author P.L. Travers, it was a complete slap in the face. Despite having script approval, Travers’s edits were largely disregarded.”
As for Stephen King, the original The Shining film starring Jack Nicholson is considered a horror classic. But King himself was not impressed. Conradt’s article relates this tidbit: “Stephen King probably made movie buffs cringe when he said he hated what Stanley Kubrick did to The Shining. ‘I’d admired Kubrick for a long time and had great expectations for the project, but I was deeply disappointed in the end result. … Kubrick is a very cold man—pragmatic and rational—and he had great difficulty conceiving, even academically, of a supernatural world. Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn’t believe, he couldn’t make the film believable to others.’”
Of course, King has had many of his books adapted to film. According to Andy Greene’s 2014 Rolling Stone interview with the author, King’s favorite story adaptation is the film Stand by Me, based on his 1982 novella, The Body. King stated, “I thought it was true to the book, and because it had the emotional gradient of the story. It was moving … He (director Rob Reiner) showed it to me in the screening room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was out there for something else, and he said, ‘Can I come over and show you this movie?’ And you have to remember that the movie was made on a shoestring. It was supposed to be one of those things that opened in six theaters and then maybe disappeared. And instead it went viral. When the movie was over, I hugged him because I was moved to tears, because it was so autobiographical.’”
Multiple Adaptations and the Public Domain
Sometimes there is more than one film version of a book. Ever wonder why there are so many movies based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? That is because the book was published so long ago that it is in the public domain. This means that the creator’s and the creator’s family’s intellectual property rights to the work have expired after a legally determined number of years, so then anyone can use the story, change it however they wish, and never pay a penny for the rights to do that. Generally, a book enters public domain in the United States 70 years after the death of the author, or if work of corporate authorship, 95 years from publication. This is why we might have a beloved copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in our personal collection at home, in addition to the many other written adaptations based on Austen’s classic, not to mention the host of films based on it in our digital or DVD libraries.
January 1st is Public Domain Day at Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of Public Domain. On the first day of each year they post a list of books that may now be freely used, copied or adapted, as far as copyrights go. In 2021, books published in 1925 have made it to the list, including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It is entirely possible that by 2023 we shall see a mash up film of Mrs. Dalloway and Mr Gatsby fighting side by side during a zombie attack, following an elegant but rather lively dinner party they enjoyed earlier in the evening. Now that would be something to see!
Libraries Love Lists
For more lists of the books that have been adapted to the screen please have a look at the following:
- ShortList.com – “The 45 Best Book-to-Film Adaptations Ever”
- BookBub.com – “40 of Our All-Time Favorite Book-to-Movie Adaptations”
- Insider.com – “13 of the Best and 13 of the Worst Movies to be Adapted from Books”
- BuzzFeed.com – “23 Book-to-Movie Adaptations that Were so Bad they Inspired Rage”
- Independent.co.uk – “25 Books that Should Have Never Been Made Into Films, from His Dark Materials to The Girl on the Train”
- LitHub.com – “20 Literary Adaptations Disavowed by Their Original Authors”
For many of us, the book is always better. Sometimes adaptations get it just right, but it is rare. Does that mean we will stop watching the adaptations? Of course not. If we are disappointed in a film we have only to pick up our favorite book again and rewatch our own inner movie. Then all is right with the world.
Coming Up
The Zoph Library blog postings will resume following Easter break. Stay tuned for our annual Academy Awards prognostication contest that we’ll conduct online (via Google Forms) April 16-24.
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