“No, But I Read The Book”
Lawrence Block
Over a good many years, my friend Donald E. Westlake wrote two dozen books about a career criminal named Parker. Because his agent had the good sense to retain rights in the character, many film deals were signed over the years, and quite a few pictures actually got made. At one time or another, and under one name or another, Parker was brought to varying degrees of life on the screen by Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson, and Anna Karina.
Don, pondering all this, said he had to conclude that the character lacked definition.
Novels are forever being turned into films, though not nearly as often as their authors would prefer. But how accurately is the novelist’s vision conveyed in the film? And how much does it matter?
I’ve had three books filmed. First was Nightmare Honeymoon (1974), based on my Deadly Honeymoon. It was directed by Elliott Silverstein and starred Dack Rambo, Rebecca Dianna Smith, and Pat Hingle. Twelve years later, Hal Ashby directed 8 Million Ways to Die, based on my Eight Million Ways to Die, with Jeff Bridges and Andy Garcia. And the following year, Hugh Wilson’s film Burglar was released, with its story drawn from two of my books about burglar/bookseller Bernard Rhodenbarr. Whoopi Goldberg had the title role, with Bobcat Goldthwait cast as Bernie’s lesbian sidekick.
Now one didn’t need to have written the books to regard all three of these movies as beneath contempt. Reviewers were pretty much unanimous in their disapproval, and the public stayed home; when one of the three bombs turned up on TV, everybody changed the channel. There were things to like here—Bridges and Garcia gave good performances, and Whoopi did what she could in a hopeless cause, but the films stank on ice.
Let’s forget Nightmare Honeymoon, because nobody’s seen it, and with luck none of you ever will. I haven’t had a peek at it myself in over thirty years, and even then I couldn’t watch it all the way through. But it’s easy to say that the other two fell a long way short of reproducing the books that spawned them. 8 Million Ways to Die took a story that was about New York and flew it to L.A., turned the plot every which way but tight, and recast the A.A. material as if written by someone on a bender. Burglar kept too much of the plot of The Burglar in the Closet, while rendering all of the book’s nuanced relationships into hard-edged and antagonistic ones.
Those are reasons why a book’s author might well be disappointed with the treatment given to his work. On the other hand, if I were handed several million dollars and charged turning a book into a movie, I don’t think gladdening the heart of the book’s author would rank very high on my list of priorities.
All things being equal, I’d want to get as much as I could of his vision on the screen. But not to the detriment of the film. Making a movie that worked, artistically and commercially, would be all that really ought to concern me.
Besides, it’s impossible to make a writer happy. Our egos won’t allow it. Whether it’s the treatment we get from cover artists (“Right there on page 117 and again on page 244 I describe her as having long black hair, and this girl’s hair is brown. And it’s not long enough, either!”) or interviewers (“The least she could have done was read the book all the way through. If she’s going to have a writer on for five minutes of drive-time AM radio, wouldn’t you think she’d be better prepared?”), we tend to come off like Rodney Dangerfield. We get no respect.
And what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work on the screen. I’ve done a couple of adaptations of my own work (and no, they never got made) and found I didn’t have to be asked to make changes; the different natures of the two media demanded it. In each case, I found the process instructive.
Once in a while, of course, someone really gets it right. Once in a while there’s a movie that takes a book, slaps it on the big screen, and works like a charm even as it reflects the writer’s vision. The most vivid recent example would be the Coens’ remake of True Grit. I’d read the Charles Portis novel first, then saw and enjoyed the Henry Hathaway film with John Wayne and Kim Darby. It wasn’t the book, but I thought it was a pretty good movie.
But the Coen brothers went back to Portis’s book, and took the revolutionary step of putting that story on the screen, using his scenes and dialogue pretty much as written. And blew the earlier picture out of the water.
Oddly, something very similar happened seventy years ago. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon succeeded so utterly that not many of us realize it was the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel. (The 1931 version starred Ricardo Cortez; the 1936 remake, called Satan Met a Lady, had Alison Skipworth playing the Sydney Greenstreet role.)
It’s also not widely known that Hammett deliberately wrote the book in the form of a prose screenplay, with nothing on the page that couldn’t be shown or spoken on the screen. It was his notion that movies were the future, that writers were best advised to write books that could be filmed, and that the ideal tactic would be to do the screenwriters’ work for them while writing the book. After this was conveniently overlooked by two sets of filmmakers, Huston did what should have been done in the first place, and put Hammett’s lines, essentially verbatim, in the mouths of the perfect cast. There’s a reason the film gets better every time you see it.
Long before he got anywhere near the bestseller lists, Elmore Leonard was selling book after book to Hollywood. (He never wrote a series because his agent, the legendary H. N. Swanson, wanted to make sure that each book came from his typewriter unencumbered. Once Dutch confided that he’d enjoyed writing about one fellow—Jack Ryan, IIRC—and would kind of like to do another book about the guy. “Write anything you like,” Swanny told him. “Just call him something else.”)
Leonard’s books have always lent themselves well to filming, and some good movies resulted over the years, along with some that weren’t so good. But the one that succeeded absolutely in transferring to the screen not merely the book but the unmistakable voice of its author was Get Shorty. I don’t even know how closely the plot of Scott Frank’s impeccable screenplay followed the book, and I can’t say I care. Those were Dutch’s people up there, and they were talking and thinking and acting as they did in the book, and making that happen is no mean trick.
It would be easy to point out all the book-to-film moves that didn’t work, and some casting choices that make Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher look positively brilliant. But the hell with that. I’ve come to believe that any film ought to benefit from the principal propounded by Dr. Johnson when he likened a woman preacher to a dog walking on his hind legs. It was, he pointed out, not ours to question whether it were done well; the wonder was that it was done at all.
I’d say that applies. As hard as it is to get any picture made, it seems like the worst sort of nit-picking to complain when one happens to be terrible.
And shouldn’t we let James M. Cain have the last word? When an interviewer asked the author of Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity how he felt about what Hollywood had done to his books, Cain looked puzzled. “But Hollywood hasn’t done anything to my books,” he said. “They’re right over there on the shelf, exactly as I wrote them.”
– said the screenwriter of Gypsy Wildcat.
Great stuff. I’m a big fan of Block, especially the Scudder books, although I am not sufficiently caught up for the new one.
I read an interview with Leonard once where he said that on the set of “The Moonshine War,” Patrick McGoohan came over to him and asked, “What’s it like watching them turn your book into a piece of shit?”
Fun read! Haven’t seen 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE in ages, but it seems to me that Ashby’s rep continues to grow and the film has found a number of defenders.
The mention of H. N. Swanson brings back a bad old memory – Shortly after I moved to L.A. in ’93, a Swanson agent agreed to represent me. He told me to start putting together ‘wish lists’ for three of my screenplays, and we set a follow-up meeting to make everything official. Before that date rolled around, the agency was bought out by Renaissance, and my guy was out of a job. No one in the new régime would even look at my scripts to see if I might be worth retaining (though they graciously said I could have my copies back – I suggested they recycle them).
GET SHORTY always struck me as a little too cartoonishly goofy, not getting the seriousness of the criminal element or the looming possibility of violence or even the gist of Southern California nearly as well as JACKIE BROWN (Leonard’s personal favorite of his adaptations).
Anyway, great guest post. I like Lawrence Block’s writing. Especially his writing about writing. He’s always inspired me to be more productive and his writer’s block cure totally works.
Nice guest post. And correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Mr. Block co-write MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS with Wong Kar Wai? Now how did THAT collaboration come about? Because, at first blush at least, that looks to be an awkward marriage of writer with material.
And what’s a good Lawrence Block starting point? This is the first thing of his I’ve read.
“And what’s a good Lawrence Block starting point? This is the first thing of his I’ve read.”
When the Sacred Ginmill Closes may be the best of the Scudder novels: very literary, driven by character, mood, and milieu.
i like Block’s Cruise-as-Reacher shot! but even that casting is nowhere near as bad as Statham-as-Parker. an abomination.
I second Michael Adams. Read WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES and if you’re interested in nonfiction TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT.
Just about the wrongest a writer’s ever been about a film adaptation of his work: Stephen King and THE SHINING. I don’t understand his disdain for the Kubrick version or his inexplicable production of that ludicrous TV remake. No one’s ever severed a book better – capturing the essence of the story, the world, the tone; leaving all the good stuff in; cutting all the boring stuff out – than Kubrick did with THE SHINING. If only Kubrick had been King’s publisher/editor, then we’d all think he was a literary genius instead of merely the great story thinker-upper and sometimes really good writer he is.
“Not sure why King objected to Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’. Guess it wasn’t up to the standard of a regular Stephen King film.”
– Alex Cox
Thanks, everybody. Graig, I did co-write MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS. WKW was a big fan of my Scudder books, and wanted us to work together. A couple of projects didn’t work, and then he came up with this. He’d made an eight-minute film set in a deli,basically the frame of the story, and had the idea she could go on this picaresque trek across America, having adventures here and there. He kept changing his mind every few days as to what the story was, and when he did love a bad idea, there was no getting him to let it go. His pictures are beautiful, and actors love that he makes them look gorgeous. I like him, he’s a very decent and charming fellow, but we were a much odder couple than Oscar and Felix.
For what it’s worth, Mr. Block, I’m one of the hardy souls who actually really liked MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS, and I liked this piece. I shall seek more of your work out.
I do have to say, though, the thing about bad adaptations of good books is it’s much harder to convince people Carl Hiaasen is one of, if not the, funniest writers in America today if all people have to go on are the movie versions of STRIPTEASE and HOOT.
Carl’s savagely funny. I haven’t seen either of those films, and now I’ll make sure not to. I can see why people would want to adapt his work, and I can also see why they’d fuck it up.
I’m glad you liked BLUEBERRY. I thought Strathairn and Portman and Weisz were terrific in it. And it was visually magnificent throughout.
A couple of years ago I told Elliot Silverstein I’d recently seen NIGHTMARE HONEYMOON, and he snapped, “I’m sorry.”
(As in, sorry I’d had to endure it, rather than apologizing for having directed it, although perhaps that was implicit. In any case, I was afraid to probe any further. And I actually didn’t think it was that bad.)
On the Leonard front, I’m always here to put in a good word for 52 Pick-Up, my favorite. I’ve never read the novel, a minor refrain on this post, but I always thought that if you like grimy desperation, and who doesn’t, you’d be hard pressed to find a better example then 52 Pick Up.
Glad you mentioned Westlake’s Parker novels, Mr. Block…the first four or so are absolutely superb crime entertainment: I haven’t seen any of the film versions out of the high-percent chance that they won’t live up to the books, even though POINT BLANK and THE OUTFIT are rumored to be pretty good. I always regretted Daniel Craig being cast as Bond because he would’ve made a superb Parker, in my idealized gritty 1960s-set films the novels deserved.
And it’s always good to remind one’s self of the Cain remark you quoted: though I’ve also heard that attributed to Chandler, it’s possible that they both had similar thought processes (don’t tell Chandler’s ghost though, I recall reading somewhere that he hated Cain with a passion and thought he only could write about “flies buzzing around garbage” or some such turn of phrase.)
To return to film, I think that the 1940s film versions of Cain’s MILDRED PIERCE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY were nothing to sneeze at (not a fan of the John Garfield POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE though.) The adaptations of Chandler’s Marlowe novels I think have been pretty universally disappointing, though I have a soft spot for Hawks’ BIG SLEEP. It’s a fun film with good performances, but there’s almost nothing left of the soul-chilling darkness of certain parts of the novel.
King’s dislike of THE SHINING always made sense to me—he’s accurately diagnosing how the movie lost what’s most interesting about the book, even as he reveals his own writerly attachment to basically internal/psychological elements of his book that don’t actually translate to film.
In the book, the haunted-house aspect is really secondary to Jack’s internal struggles; the Overlook is an arena where his best and worst selves battle it out. Fundamentally, it’s a book about parenting, and about the terrible fear that you’re going to be just as bad at it as your own parents were. Much of the book’s power comes from the way that the present and the past are constantly blurring together; the constant intrusions of the Overlook’s ghost are essentially objective correlatives for Jack and Wendy’s inability to escape their parents’ bad examples.
This is all really moving and interesting, but it’s also very internal and backstory dependent. Kubrick tossed it, and made a kick-ass haunted house movie with a self-conscious rejection of psychological depth (why does Jack go crazy? Kubrick doesn’t care). King rightly notes that this isn’t his book, but as his more faithful and absolutely terrible miniseries adaptation showed, it’s almost impossible to adapt what he wrote into a good movie. In a way, I wish the more faithful adaptation had been done by Cassavettes, or some other director who would more willfully flip Kubrick’s structure completely, jettisoning the haunted-house elements in favor of an unsparing portrait of an alcoholic father and breakdown-prone mother trying to care for a special-needs child.
I can certainly understand King’s disappointment/ambivalence/dislike for Kubrick’s The Shining (not the director’s best, but my favorite of his films), especially for the major alterations from the novel, but whenever I read King’s opinion on any movie (and this may not be fair of me) I can’t help remember that, though an outstanding horror novelist, King is a really dreadful writer of teleplays and screenplays. I still have vivid memories of a lengthy sequence in the miniseries version of The Stand, where the townspeople have a meeting to decide who should be on the committee to figure out what to do – is this really a good use of screen time, even in a four-night series?
I still think a great horror film could be made from Pet Sematary, but it wouldn’t have a King screenplay (or Mary Lambert direction).
And let me just add that I’m thrilled that my new favorite blog has a guest blogger who is also one of my favorite mystery/thriller writers.
As a Stark-Parker obsessive, I don’t think Statham is at all a bad choice for the role, though the blurbs I’ve read about the new film suggest that its Parker has some sort of code regarding not taking money from people who can’t spare it – as far as I can remember, Parker’s only code from the books was don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to, but only because it causes too many problems.
Since I sometimes get funny looks for singing the praises of Jason Statham and Taylor Hackford, the notion of them teaming up makes me a little giddy. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I had read any of the Parker novels, but there you go.
This was a really enjoyable guest post – thanks for stopping by, Mr. Block. Adaptation in general fascinates me (as do remakes, which are, after all, a form of adaptation), and it’s great to hear such a refreshing look at it from an author. I’m also a fan of My Blueberry Nights, by the way – it was the first WKW film I saw and I still have a soft spot for it.
Mr. Block, any thoughts about Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptations of Parker? I haven’t read the original books, but the comics are gorgeous and compelling.
Gee, mistur Shaw, u sur writ gud.
I always thought it was Faulkner who made that “Cain” quote, but who can say at this point?
Mr. Block, I adore the Bernie Rhodenbarr series. When may we expect another?