Book Adaptations On Television/Movies

[Hard Hit Prince]

As I was reading Stephen King's Under The Dome, I thought I could check out the television show that premiered last year over on CBS and was filled with bad reviews - so first things first, the book is more than enjoyable. As soon as you start, you want to keep going and that's all I ask in a book. However the pilot episode did have some changes and a completely different tone and pace from the book which annoyed me of course, because, the adaptation was done poorly and I sincerely don't want to keep watching it.

I was reading the director view on Under The Dome TV Show, and he said that his goal was to follow The Walking Dead footsteps as in having a story and make some changes and be free to use your creativity in that said world. In that same quote he pretty much knocked HBO for pretty much following every step of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones.

So what is your view on book adaptations for television or movies? Would you rather have it following the original story or you really want a set of new plots and new ideas to evolve the same characters?

I for one am all for following the original books as I feel that the creator point of view is usually the best one. Also while Game of Thrones has been one of the best television shows of its kind to most, shows like Walking Dead have been losing a lot of steam and quality. In movies you also have Shawshank Redemption from Stephen King, which I've read after I watched the movie and the difference between it's secondary, most like the adaptations of Harry Potter - which means, small things that are interesting but not that important to the development of the story are left out, while some other characteristics gain for focus than they originally had, but still not being really important.

Example: In HP he doesn't know what are the Horcruxes before-hand, instead he dreams with them by entering Voldemort's mind and hearing the Horcruxes kind of buzzing. So discuss.

 

[Dowdsy McDowds]

It depends on the original source and how well that story will translate to a different medium.

World War Z, as I've mentioned a couple of times before in other threads, would have been much better suited as a relatively short TV series, say 6 - 8 parts. The book is fantastic and given that it is presented as a set of interviews with survivors of the zombie outbreak looking back at events, a far more straight-forward and less OTT presentation could have been made rather than the generic film that we got.

The Jaws novel has a fairly laboured and distracting love-story thrown in that gets distracting at times. The movie doesn't include this unnecessary burden and wouldn't have been a better film had it been included.

The Sin City and Watchmen movies both ripped probably 80%+ of the dialogue from their source novels and both used the images as storyboards, more-or-less. With both, it seemed that that was the best way to appease most of their fans, although the ones complaining about the slight switch of endings in Watchmen are pretty foolish.

 

[Mitch Henessey]

There's an interview on the Chamber Of Secrets DVD (I don't own any of the box sets, so I don't know if they have the same interview) with J. K. Rowling and Steve Kloves (with Rowling's input, he wrote the screenplay for Chamber Of Secrets, and if I'm not mistaken, Kloves wrote the screenplays for all the Harry Potter films).

In the interview, Rowling talks about how she struggled with Kloves ripping pages out of her "baby" for the movie, but in the end, Rowling understood the need for changes to accommodate the film. But Rowling emphasized the importance of keeping certain parts of the book in the screenplay, because Kloves needs certain events for the rest of the series.

One of the reasons why I mention the Chamber Of Secrets is the ending. I love it. The set up for the reveal of Tom Riddle as Lord Voldemort is perfect, and they did a phenomenal job of mirroring the events in the book, with Riddle using a wand to rearrange his name to spell Lord Voldemort.

I'm a big fan of the Secret Window film (good performances from Depp and Turturro, but Turturro upstages Depp). They completely changed the ending for the film. In the novella, Mort/John Shooter dies, but in the movie, Mort kills Amy and Ted. The changes don't bother me, because Depp and Turturro are fantastic together, and I actually like the ending. It's more diabolical, sinister, and it's genuinely surprising with the bad guy escaping justice.

The Mist? Again, they changed the ending, and it's one of the most memorable shock endings ever, and it's something you'll talk about after the movie. On top of that, Thomas Jane is solid leading man, and Marcia Gay Harden is fantastic as Mrs. Carmody. Although, Stephen King himself openly admits he hates (and he's not backing down now) Kubrick's The Shining, but The Shining is praised as a genuine horror classic, and one of the greatest films ever made. Staying on the Stephen King path, The Langoliers should be remembered as one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever (Bronson Pinchot is a riot as Craig Toomey, and David Morse is reliable as usual), but the CGI for The Langoliers is beyond atrocious and laughable.

If we're talking about a series like HP, you could make an argument for a continuity problem for a series, if you omit certain parts from the book. Changes don't bother me most of the time, because when it comes to the movie, the quality of the final product (acting, the overall screenplay, dialogue, directing, etc.) will outshine any inconsistencies or changes for the book. More often than not, die hard fans of the source material will complain about SOMETHING no matter, and there's nothing you can do about that.

 

[Phreak]

Well, this debate has been around a while. There are extremes of both. Actually, even though I am super cheap the little I have seen, I have been impressed with HBO's adaption of A Game Of Thrones. I saw the occasional episode here and there and granted Martin's writing style is hard to adapt(the chapters overly at times due to it being told from Points of View), but on the whole it is good, the Red Wedding for example, was exactly as I envisioned it. Other things were also well done.

The problem is with novels, some of the source material is dense.

Example.

IT-The Miniseries, there is a LOT that was cut out. Granted some stuff would be impossible to film due to the graphic nature of the scenes. Plus the whole turtle weirdness in the later part of the novel. If they tried to adapt it it woulda been hard to do as a tv movie.



Stuff always gets shaved for the sake of pacing.

Right now they are adapting one of David Weber's Honorverse novels. Being a military Sci-Fi, there are massive info dumps that occur periodically in the novel. These will easily be cut for pacing, and some characters motivations will undoubtly be changed.

 

[Lowdown]

Phreak brought up an excellent point with "It". More often than not a tv or big screen adaptation will be tweaked for time purposes. Hell it's like that for a lot of Stephen King works alone. "Under the Dome" was the only novel of King's I read before I saw the tv adaptation. I was pinpointing everything that was opposite of the book. Main characters or lack thereof (like Rusty Everett). While I'll still watch when it comes back, I feel very displaced with the character shifts. At least the main plot with "It" and "The Stand" remained somewhat intact.