Don't you hate it when Hollywood F*CKS up books?

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Permalink Reply by UltraKid-SoulChild#1 on March 5, 2009 at 7:44pm

James and the Giant Peach(which was actually better than the book), Bridge to Teriabithia, The Witches, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory were all good movies based on books. Oh and lets not forget Q & A.

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Permalink Reply by WiZeWoRdZ on March 6, 2009 at 1:53pm

nope not really haha jk .. although sometimes movies can do ish that u just can explain in such detail in a book

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Permalink Reply by Annie on March 6, 2009 at 6:36pm

"The Other Boleyn Girl", every "Harry Potter", "Hannibal Rising", the list is endless.
One of my favourite books is "The Time Travellers Wife" and that's currently being given the Hollywood treatment. I'm too scared to go and see it in case they rip it apart.

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Permalink Reply by Lord Tzeentch on March 6, 2009 at 9:11pm

Hollywood fucks up a lot of stuff.Your point?

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Permalink Reply by Alter_Ego on March 11, 2009 at 12:09am

One thing I notice Hollywood does when adapting a novel is that they tend to be more faithful to the source material when they are adapting a book aimed at children (Harry Potter, Twilight). They'll try to tell the story scene-for-scene, and not change the characters.*

When they adapt a book intended for adults, however, they'll go nuts and change anything they want to make it more appealing to a broader audience. Take that Agent Salt movie they're adapting (I haven't read the book, by the way). They changed the protagonist from a man to a woman so that Angelina Jolie could play him. Why? What's wrong with having a big name actor play Salt? The only reason I can think of is that it will make an action movie (generally geared towards a male audience) more appealling to a female audience.

Then, there was I Am Legend-- almost nothing like the book. It almost seems as though when Hollywood adapts a book, what they really mean to do is just buy up the rights to a familiar title so that they can market a movie as being "based on a best-selling novel". Now that I think about it, I'm kind of glad that not many books get adapted, nowadays, since they get spared the indignity having all their goodness bastardized just so a bunch of suits can make a buck. I think this is why JD Salinger has never allowed anyone to adapt The Cathcher in the Rye. I'd hate to see Holden Caulfield changed to Helen Caulfield-- a poor little rich girl from the San Fernando Valley-- so that they could make him more appealing to twelve-year-old girls.

*The DaVinci Code is probably the only adult-targetted novel in recent history to have a faithful film adaptation.

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Permalink Reply by Janie on March 11, 2009 at 10:51pm

lol I could imagine Holden as Helen. He is a little bitch. I'm sorry I really didn't like that book.

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Permalink Reply by Conejita on April 16, 2009 at 4:58pm

that certainly doesn't apply to all children's books. The Seeker was almost nothing like the books (and completely sucked).

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Permalink Reply by Dorcas on April 18, 2009 at 7:27pm

Yeah, think you're right about that. The one time I remember saying "Hey, that was almost EXACTLY the book, they didn't change much at all!" was Holes, a kids book.

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Permalink Reply by Dorcas on April 16, 2009 at 1:38pm

It doesn't bother me personally when they fuck up an adaptation, at least not as long as I've read the original. What bothers me is that people who see a movie expect that they henceforth know what the fuck they're talking about in regard to the book. It also might ruin reading the book for people too. Worst case so far is the recent Watchmen movie.

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Permalink Reply by Alter_Ego on April 16, 2009 at 5:54pm

I certainly agree with you, there. Whenever a book, comic, TV show, or whatever gets adapted, the fanboys are often the most dismissive. Watchmen was a good movie, and I think it remained very faithful to the source material. The thing that the fanboys complain about the most seems to be the ending, while they seem to ignore the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of the movie. The ending, by the way, wasn't too far off, in my opinion. The results are basically the same.

I'm starting to think that maybe movies shouldn't remain so faithful to their source material. I read Fight Club, recently, and it was almost exactly like the movie. I had already seen the movie, so it kind of ruined the book, for me. There weren't any surpises (except for the epilogue at the end) and the experience I got from reading the book was that it didn't seem so original. If a movie is 100% faithful to its source or close to it, then it takes away the integrity of the source material. Why read the book when you can just watch the movie?

On a side note, I think that when adapting a book into a movie, they should leave the key characters alone (turning Agent Salt into a woman so Angelina Jolie could play him. PUH-lease!).

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Permalink Reply by Dorcas on April 18, 2009 at 7:33pm

Meh, the ending change didn't bother me all that much. It made slightly less sense on a logical level, but it worked well enough and it didn't change the implications enormously. What bothered me was the parts where they changed it for no good goddamned reason. Like the intro scene with the cops where it flashes back and forth. Emulating that properly would have worked perfectly in the format, and it would have been an excellent way to win the fanboys over right from the start, and changing it without changing the dialog was idiotic, since some of the dialog between the two interwoven scenes plays off of each other. But I'm not going to go too much farther into Watchmen, that's not really the subject.

On the note of key characters, yeah, that always bothers me. Like, say, Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds. What the hell? In the book the main character was a scientifically-minded fellow, whose family played no active role in the story whatsoever. Dakota Fanning screaming the whole time did nothing good for that film, and I thought that Tom Cruise was going to end up hopping in a fighter jet to kill him some aliems by the end.

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Permalink Reply by Lindsey=mc2 on May 30, 2009 at 11:41pm

The poor phantom of the Opera has been screwed so many times I feel sorry for him. There is an occasional ok version (hello, Chaney version!) but then there's the Argento version which is so unbelievably awful. And his face make-up seems to get lamer and lamer in every version.

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