The Book Was Better

Image: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/mediaindex/

By Ray Tabler

Based on the image above, you might expect this to be a rant about the 1997 movie Starship Troopers. It isn’t. Not exactly. I cynically used that image to rope in people on either side of the controversy surrounding the film. I feel somewhat justified in doing so, because the director of Starship Troopers essentially pulled a similar bait-and-switch on Heinlein fans. They bought tickets, expecting the book, and got Paul Verhoeven’s political views instead.

Not that I blame Verhoeven. All’s fair in love, war, and creative endeavors. Caveat emptor. Or videntium cave, in this case. (Google Translate assures me that’s Latin for “viewer beware.” Although I won’t vouch for it being conjugated properly.) A beloved story was hollowed out and commandeered as a Trojan horse, presenting opinions with which Heinlein probably didn’t agree. Was it worth the deception? The jury’s still out on that. And probably will be for some time. What Verhoeven did accomplish was to ignite a fan war that rages to this day. As we know from the iCarly episode “i Start a Fan War,” those conflicts can endure, growing more and more bitter with passing years. Because “…these people don’t have lives to get back to…”

All of this sturm und drang derives from adapting a book to the screen, big and silver or small and LED. Books are not movies, and movies are not books. The same goes for TV shows. Changes must be made when slicing a book into images, pasted on a screen at a rate of 24 frames per second. To say nothing of dialog. Try as producers, screen writers, and directors might, there is no reliable playbook for accomplishing that task.

Ernest Hemingway was once asked about selling books to people in Hollywood, to be made into movies. Which he did a number of times. Hemingway’s witty reply was, “The way you handle it is this. Arrange to meet the producers at the California/Nevada state line. They toss you the money. You toss them the book. Then hop in a car, and drive east as fast as possible. And pretend it never happened.” There is a lot to be said for this approach.

It is a rare author who can stomach what must be done to his work when it is processed into a movie or TV show, like making sausage. At least the author, ideally, has the 30 pieces of silver as a comfort blanket during the ensuing trauma. Not so the devoted fan.

An informative case would that of Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson, the director, strove mightily to follow Tolkien’s text as much as practical. Some changes were necessary, but with restraint. Fans of the books understood that. That purchased Jackson the latitude to stretch The Hobbit over 3 movies. And quite a stretch that turned out to be. Then, Amazon produced a TV series adapted from Tolkien’s prequel, the Silmarillion, titled The Rings of Power. Many fans hate this production with a seething, purple passion. Would Rings of Power have been better received if it had stuck closer to the original story? I cannot say. And I won’t hazard a guess. The fan war rages on.

Who Goes There was a John W. Campbell short story, which was made into a 1951 film, The Thing from Another World. I’m not a Campbell scholar, so I don’t know how closely The Thing from Another World follows the original story. I have watched the movie, though, and the 1982 remake, The Thing, which departs from the 1951 movie quite a bit. Many say that The Thing is better than the 1951 movie. I would agree, although both are very good examples of the genre.

Sherlock Holmes is a character dragooned into service by decades of film producers. Although originally set in Victorian times, Holmes has been whisked forward in time to World War II and the 2000s. Although usually portrayed as a reserved Englishman, he’s also been shown as a cartoon mouse detective, and a deranged New Yorker, among other mutations and permutations. Most of these productions at east made a profit.

The point is that not following the original story is not an automatic recipe for disaster. It can be done, and done well. Of course, the prequel to The Thing, also called The Thing (2011) , was judged ho-hum. Rings of Power and The Thing 2011 were both prequels. Maybe there’s a prequel curse. It’s tempting to pursue that into a discussion around the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Harry Potter prequels, sequels, tween-quels, and periphery-quels. But even I am not foolish enough to blunder into those minefields.

Also worth mentioning are movies, and TV shows, made from legends. That’s a subject which is ripe for a PhD thesis in film studies, if there is such a thing. They are myriad. Probably because legends happen to be in the public domain. The Odessey, King Arthur, and Robin Hood provide ready examples. Unshackled by copyright entanglements, all three legends are the subject of numerous adaptations. Some are good. Some are merely watchable. A few arguably qualify as hate crimes. I will leave sorting out which are which as an exercise for the interested reader. Links to the adaptions are provide below, or in the comments section.

Have a happy fan war!

END.