More Musing on Adaptations

[Cindy C.]

Luke wrote:

> So here's my new question for ponderance.  What is the ultimate 
goal 
> of an adaptation?  <snip criteria> 
> 
> * Inspires those who are not already familiar with the source to 
seek 
> it out

Hmmm.  I don't know about this one.  I rarely see a movie and then go 
back and read the book.  I tried this with "Silence of the Lambs."  
The book was very much like the movie, so much so that I recognized 
all of the dialogue and stopped reading it before finishing it.  
Maybe this criterion ought to be "Inspires those who are not familiar 
with the source to conclude that the source must be excellent."  I 
don't know.

>In my opinion, JKR would have been wise to tell Kloves and 
> Columbus more about the outline for future books than she 
apparently 
> did, because then they might have had more to go on to make some 
> tough decisions.  <snip example about Percy>    
> But the point is that such as it is, he has to show up in the first 
> movie, even though he serves no plot function in the first movie, 
> simply on the faith that he might be important in the future and to 
> leave him out entirely would make people wonder where he came from 
> all of a sudden in the later movies.  This is what I meant about 
> PS/SS being the hardest book to adapt.
> 

I'm not so sure that characters who are important in successive 
movies have to be introduced in the first movie.  The screenwriter 
apparently thought so, but I don't.  I think each movie should be 
self-contained.  Or maybe the way to phrase it is that each movie 
ought to be free to be self-contained if doing something else will 
crowd out scenes needed to move the movie plot along.  So let's say 
NHN just turned up for the Deathday Party in CoS, or became really 
important in Book 6, but hadn't been mentioned in PS/SS.  I wouldn't 
have a problem with that.  


Maybe the difficulty in adapting PS/SS stems largely from the fact 
that it is a fantasy.  In "Shawshank Redemption" (a great film, BTW), 
they didn't have to spend the first 50 minutes introducing us to the 
setting.  I glanced at the time when Harry settled into his dorm in 
PS/SS, and 50 minutes had elapsed.  So we used almost an hour to set 
the stage for the next 90-minutes of establishing and solving the 
mystery.  I don't know if it would have been possible to skip some of 
the pre-Hogwarts scenes to allocate the time differently.  The only 
candidate for elimination is Diagon Alley but . . . I really liked 
Diagon Alley.  

So maybe it is really difficult to do a top-notch fantasy novel 
adaptation?  The "Wizard of Oz" movie was done well, of course, but 
my husband tells me that the "Watership Down" movie was a disaster, 
even though we both loved the book.

Cindy (scurrying off to write a middling novel that someone can turn 
into a blockbuster film)