Examples of terrible adaptations

[Gold Trumpet]

If I read every great book that was adaptated into a movie, I'd honestly think just about every book adaptation would likely be a failure. Producers have the obcession to adapt great books and the idea of even coming near showing the depths of that book is hard to come by. Also, it is my belief that all good art has one concrete basis: "In a great work of art the meduim is weddled to the subject that it becomes impossible to think them apart. To take the writing out of a great novel is to run the risk of emptying out the baby with the bath." -Margaret Kennedy

Exceptions arise. One such instance for me was A Clockwork Orange. It isn't that the film is more powerful than the book, it just is the movie is smart enough to not adapt the 21st chapter of the book where all evil things done in the book are brought down to the excuse level of "Oh, they were only kids and everyone grows up." As a way of finding an ending, this simple life lesson is insulting to the extremity of actions that happen in the book.

Other than that, this thread is for the most insulting of book adaptations where you felt the producers really fucked everything up: or it could be for a film that is highly acclaimed by everyone but (in your opinion) sucks because it is so minor in accomplishment to the original source.

My choice is for a highly acclaimed movie. L.A. Confidential was directed by Curtis Hansen and adapted from the novel of the same name by James Ellroy. I am a James Ellroy fan. From reading the novel, the movie generalized the details to death. The simple story of Guy Pierce and Russel Crowe both being cops who hate each other but then at the end unexpectedly turn into partners on the same side. In the movie, this change seems to happen over a weekend. In the novel, it is a ten year story of their hate for each other and the grandness of this turn around for both men really felt. Also, the writing of James Ellroy is nearly destroyed. Ellroy simply doesn't write crime novels, but with every book, writes closer and closer to the style of the subject he is writing. L.A. Confidential is written very much in 1950s slang and very hard boiled and it only operates on this plateau. Curtis Hansen has the characters speaking this way, but his filmmaking isn't on that level though. It is general filmmaking as if the story is traditional; Ellroy writes the novel as if taking a chain saw to every tradition of the crime novel and ripping apart  superficiality. The filmmaker I really imagine actually taking on this novel to success would be Oliver Stone. Stone is as frenzied and bored with traditions in storytelling as Ellroy.

I read L.A. Confidential after liking the movie and became a James Ellroy fan for it. I tried to give excuses for the move at first, but I don't anymore. Its a cheap film to the novel. My opinion.

[modage]

i think a lot of people would say the same thing about The Shining.  but personally, i've never read the book and think the movie is great.  i also happen to think LA confidential is great.  i dont know that there's any movie that lives up to its source material. they're just different mediums. theres no way to get in the details.  i'm sure there are much worse adaptations than la confidential though, which, without reading the book stands as a good movie.  so i dont think it counts as a "terrible adaptation" because they adapted the source material into a great movie that stands on its own.  for better examples of "terrible adatpations" see: about 3/4 of all stephen king movies.

Also, the writing of James Ellroy is nearly destroyed. Ellroy simply doesn't write crime novels, but with every book, writes closer and closer to the style of the subject he is writing. L.A. Confidential is written very much in 1950s slang and very hard boiled and it only operates on this plateau. Curtis Hansen has the characters speaking this way, but his filmmaking isn't on that level though.

i dont know that what you said means anything.

[RegularKarate]

Yeah... I think your "LA Confidential as an insult to the book" comment is pretty weak GT.  You read the book, that thing is FAR too dense and pulpish to do adapt directly... I think they made good choices (though it confused the HELL out of me when I read White Jazz without reading LA Confidential first).

I agree that the majority of Stephen King adaptations are true insults to the originals, but the way that King writes, it's really hard to translate a lot of it to film.

I really liked Sam Raimi's Simple Plan, but the book is a lot darker and I think that he played it down too much to avoid having an unliked main character.

[SoNowThen]

I'm gonna have to go ahead and totally disagree, GT.

Even Ellroy will tell you that the adaptation is dead on. He knows it's one of his weakest endings ever. As much as I think Hansen and Helgeland are total hacks, they managed to reach some kinda nirvana of storytelling for this one, and everything they changed was for the better, imo. To do a pure adaptation of Ellroy, you need an X rating. I think you picked the worst possible example, as this could be the crowning moment of glory for adaptations.

ANyway... I'd have to say any Dickens book that has been tried has failed pretty miserably. Dunno why they can't seem to do Dickens proper. Also, I haven't seen, but have heard that the Vonnegut adaptations are pretty horrible.

[coffeebeetle]

I'm gonna have to go ahead and totally disagree, GT.

Even Ellroy will tell you that the adaptation is dead on. He knows it's one of his weakest endings ever. As much as I think Hansen and Helgeland are total hacks, they managed to reach some kinda nirvana of storytelling for this one, and everything they changed was for the better, imo. To do a pure adaptation of Ellroy, you need an X rating. I think you picked the worst possible example, as this could be the crowning moment of glory for adaptations.

ANyway... I'd have to say any Dickens book that has been tried has failed pretty miserably. Dunno why they can't seem to do Dickens proper. Also, I haven't seen, but have heard that the Vonnegut adaptations are pretty horrible.

They are man.  Breakfast of Champions and Slaughter House Five, fucking awful adaps, fucking beautiful books.  

[Gold Trumpet]

I'm gonna have to go ahead and totally disagree, GT.

Even Ellroy will tell you that the adaptation is dead on. He knows it's one of his weakest endings ever. As much as I think Hansen and Helgeland are total hacks, they managed to reach some kinda nirvana of storytelling for this one, and everything they changed was for the better, imo. To do a pure adaptation of Ellroy, you need an X rating. I think you picked the worst possible example, as this could be the crowning moment of glory for adaptations.

I'm not talking about adaptation of just content, but adaptation of the same fire that Ellroy has in writing the novel. The film is just so general filmmaking-wise in approaching the story that I wish someone, like Stone, would have approached the story with an intent not to be traditional about it and try to be ferocious in telling the story as Ellroy was with writing the book.

Adapting everything in a book is impossible. A movie can adapt a book on a level of objectivity the book has if even it doesn't delve as far into the story as the book does.

[molly]

I saw A Thousand Acres yesterday, and it sucked - it looked pathetic, like some TV movie. I think adaptations should be more relying on camera, the visual stuff, telling story with camera, not just following actors arround. In my opinion, one of the best adaptations is Trainspotting. I've read the book and saw the film and loved them both. Too much "respect" for the writer of the book is not a good thing. I'm not saying that disrespect is good, I just want to say that the novelist can ramble all he/she wants, but filmmakers have more limited space.

[Gamblour.]

Since I don't read much, I don't have much to comment on. But I remember really liking October Sky as a movie, until I read the book Rocket Boys for Physics, oddly enough. I mean, maybe I'm naive when it comes to how adaptations work, but the book was so much better. I guess I didn't like how they turned it into the ultimate feel-good movie, the book has a lot more teenage issues to cope with, they are so well written that they would've made beautiful scenes. Instead, they just formulized the naturally good story, I felt like it was a cop out.

I read a Prayer for Owen Meany, which was turned into Simon Birch, but I've never seen Birch. I do know that it's bad enough to have John Irving not want the movie title to be the same.

I have questions for people who do know, how are the adaptations of:

Fight Club
Election
About Schmidt
Requiem for a Dream
Full Metal Jacket

These are great movies, I'm just curious as to how the book translates.

Oh and one more note, after being letdown by the ending to Mystic River, my mother, who read the book, told me how the book was different, and it blew me away that they would change it at all. I actually grew to dislike the movie a little more.

[cine]

I'd have to say any Dickens book that has been tried has failed pretty miserably. Dunno why they can't seem to do Dickens proper.

You're not including Lean, are you?

As I mentioned in another thread, the Shipping News is an awful adaptation. I read it before it was released in the theatres and I was  disgusted with the movie. It could have been great. We're talking GREAT. But the screenplay was unbearably weak and the direction wasn't too grand either. This was a film that could've had a really wonderful, epic feel to it but instead was too banal for my liking. There was several other things wrong with it but there's no point in explaining if people haven't read the book. Just skip the film and read it instead.

[Ghostboy]

Yeah, the David Lean films really capture Dickens style well, I think. And there are a handful of high quality Christmas Carol adaptations.

Most adaptations stick too literally to the source, and even when they are very good, they're also rather rote (at least for those who have read the book), because that very faithfulness cuts down on opportunites to expand cinematically where the written word cannot.

I have questions for people who do know, how are the adaptations of:

Fight Club

The movie's better, in my opinion. The book reads like a movie anyway, and you can finish it in the same amount of time it would take to watch the film.

Generally, Iv'e found that rather slight books like that usually work better as movies. U-Turn is another example. Classics and more high profile literature is usually much harder to adapt, because the authors have such uniquely literary voices. Take Beloved for instance -- the movie was as good as an adaptation of that book could have been, but Toni Morrison's prose was such an integral part of the book that the movie could never live up to it. Kubrick had the right idea with Lolita (and so did Nabakov, since he wrote the script), and took the story in a different direction that was more suited to film.

I agree with GT on his explanation for why A Clockwork Orange was better as a movie -- I wrote my senior research paper on that very subject. I also think the Shining is better than the book (which is still good in its own right).

Some good ones: The Hours, although it lacked any real cinematic style of its own, was a remarkably successful adaptation of a book that I would have thought nigh impossible to turn into a film. Of course, both the book and movie benefit from having read Mrs. Dalloway. Eyes Wide Shut and Traumnovelle are two wonderfully complimentary pieces -- the novel is like the flip side to the movie.

Also, just glancing at the top row of my bookshelf, I'm reminded that Wonder Boys, Jude, Short Cuts and Heart Of Darkness all had excellent adaptations. Short Cuts in particular, for the way Altman combined the Carver's previously unconnected stories.

Oh, and A Prayer For Owne Meany was a fine book -- I'm not a huge John Irving fan, but it was a good read, and Simon Birch was a rather bizarre bastardization of it, even though it wasn't a complete failure as a film. The whole thing just reeks of wasted opportunity in every aspect.

[SoNowThen]

The Lean version of Great Expectations was fine until the 3/4 mark, then became a disgusting sellout version, therefore I hate it. You can't come that far and drop the ball at the end.


Hmmmm, GT, you've got me on the Oliver Stone thing. When I read the first two books in the American trilogy, I kept thinking of Stone (probably because of JFK). I'd like to see Stone get a deal with HBO to do a 16 hour (8 part) version of those books. That'd be the only way to do it...

But I think if you're gonna do a film (like LA Confidential) you've gotta make a "film" film, and not try to preserve Ellroy's voice. That being said, I think Ellroy is the perfect book-film writer in terms of his style, which is so spare, it's like reading a shot list from a director's notebook. It just happens that the material is hardcore, and would be waaaaay too long to put to a feature film. No, I think LA Confidential is a perfect adaptation. They got the three character set-up perfect, and that was the meat of the structure. Plus, Ellroy's document inserts were easily filmable (is that a word?), and while the compressed characters lost their flavor, they did their job story-wise. A good movie based on an adaptation should be more enjoyable than the book, but a re-read of the book should fill you in on backstory info and thoughts that the movie could not, thereby enriching both. I hope...

[Gold Trumpet]

But I think if you're gonna do a film (like LA Confidential) you've gotta make a "film" film, and not try to preserve Ellroy's voice. That being said, I think Ellroy is the perfect book-film writer in terms of his style, which is so spare, it's like reading a shot list from a director's notebook. It just happens that the material is hardcore, and would be waaaaay too long to put to a feature film. No, I think LA Confidential is a perfect adaptation. They got the three character set-up perfect, and that was the meat of the structure. Plus, Ellroy's document inserts were easily filmable (is that a word?), and while the compressed characters lost their flavor, they did their job story-wise. A good movie based on an adaptation should be more enjoyable than the book, but a re-read of the book should fill you in on backstory info and thoughts that the movie could not, thereby enriching both. I hope...

You can adapt it cinematically and change the objective to apply to film, but you have to ask whether the change is more interesting than what is in the book. Usually, the answer is 'no'. I think it is a 'no' here as well. The film does hold much of the story, but makes the approach to it convential. With Stone in command, you could have the fierceness in the book in the film and the very unromantic look at this time realized. As movie casting goes, everyone in the film is too good looking for their roles (besides maybe Spacey. he is suppose to be chique). Everyone feels polished as if it was Hollywood created. I'm not asking for an adaptation that covers the entire book or all the language in the film, but at least wants to capture the same taste of aggression and brutal honesty as in the book. That would be more interesting.

[cine]

Everyone feels polished as if it was Hollywood created. I'm not asking for an adaptation that covers the entire book or all the language in the film, but at least wants to capture the same taste of aggression and brutal honesty as in the book. That would be more interesting.

Which reminds me: Has anybody here read War and Peace and seen both Bondarchuk's Russian version of the film AND Vidor's American version of the film?

[SHAFTR]

Good Adaptations:
About a Boy
High Fidelity
Ghost World

Bad Adaptations:
League of Extraordinary Gentleman

[Pedro]

I try my best not to compare books to film adaptations.  I think that they should just stand on their own, and the complaint that a movie is too different from its source material is bullshit.  If it works it works. that's it