Adapt That! Five Grossly Unfaithful Book to Film Adaptations...That worked
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From F.W. Murnau skirting the rights to Bram Stoker's Dracula to come up with the fabulous Nosferatu, to Charlie Kaufmann folding Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief into a meta-digression on the art of creating something, out of...well...something, to Uwe Boll's daisy chain of video game stinkers, the adaptation of books, comics, games, television programs, etc. has been around since the creation of the the feature film. Movies have always been an amalgamation of other art-forms (music, image, theatre) so it goes without saying that the would be inspired by and created out of other media. Mars Attacks went so far as to be an adaption (of sorts) from trading card series, and a certain Johnny Depp headlined franchise built from a theme park ride. Yet things as non-narrative as cards or rides allow for the writers to do essentially what they want. Recently, the film version of Watchmen has been raked over the coals for being 'too faithful' - a veritable shooting of the individual panels from the graphic novel which strangles the actors. Yet, explain No Country For Old Men, Nineteen Eighty-Four or Sin City: Three films that is fair to say are rigorously faithful adaptations their source novels. For those of the school that the different mediums (print and cinema) require radically different approaches, there is the situation when a novel is turned on its ear, then flipped through the air and pulled inside out. Is this a recipe for disaster? And I am not talking Shakespeare adaptations which play with setting more than the story or thematic elements, but leave the basic drama and overall meaning in place. No, these five films below were big fat April Fools Day surprises to fans of the source material. Love 'em or hate 'em they are all aging very well.
"Starship Troopers"
Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlen was pro-military guy, he lobbied (back in the day) for MORE nuclear weapons testing. Starship Troopers the novel was a way of illustrating a lot of experience and ideas during his service in the military whilst espousing his political and social opinions with a collection of cool high-tech toys in an 'aliens at war' story. Then along comes Ed Neumeier and Paul Verhoeven, still with traces of Robocop's satirical and ultra-violent tone lingering in their brain. The duo turned the book into a satire of the extremes - pretty folks being chewed up by the military system in service of the privilege of voting or a free education mixed with broad parody of the chain of command and over-reaction (The Buenos Aires sequence frankly seems down-right prescient after 9/11). Either 180 degrees from the tone of the book or (like good comedy), just taking the original idea to its absolute extreme), the central message of Starship Troopers the movie is, "war makes fascists of us all." The filmmakers go even further in making the films structure resemble a "Why We Fight" propaganda piece as if to really stick it to the intentions of Heinlein. And the capper is that they did all the action bits free of the high-tech power-suits used so prominently in the novel. Here just guns and grenades. Straight up and Simple. Yet the film is an art-house blockbuster in its own way. After more than a decade, it has won a lot of people over (perhaps some of the folks who missed the joke the first time around) and in the high-tech department, I do believe that Starship Troopers has the best CGI-to-practical effects blending out there. The film has improved with age.
"The Life and Opinion’s of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman"
an 18th century novel which was published in 9 volumes over a period of as many years (and at the end of the story, the lead character has yet to be born). It has not been read my many (myself included) outside of hard-core literary circles, where, it is (somewhat) regarded as a literary classic, perhaps as much for its vaunted length as its meta-leanings (post-‘modern’ before there was a ‘modern’). One of the best jokes of the film is that anyone would even try to make a film out of this novel (what’s next Finnegan's Wake?). And for such a lengthy word-count the fact that Michael Winterbottom turned in a film that clocks in at 90 minutes is certainly not in the spirit of the piece. Thus the movie becomes less about the film of Tristram Shandy and more of a study of making the film about Tristram Shandy, with all the personality, ego, frustration, attention to detail and just plain waiting involved in the creative process of making a film (which is also, maybe, an allegory for creating good comedy). The banter between the leads, played by two top-shelf comedians, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon is brilliant, as are the fine (and diverse) collection of supporting players. Gentleman and scholarly literature should never be this laugh-out-loud funny.
"The Running Man"
Richard Bachman's (OK, Stephen King if we must) novel mushes together a capitalism-gone-wild America with games shows and reality television. It involves a nationwide man-hunt for a 'contestant' to survive 30 days with all the law enforcement, and the participating population aimed to drag him down. Ben Richards enters the contest voluntarily to save his wife and daughter and ends up blowing up the state while giving the establishment the finger. Dark and depressing stuff. Yet the 1980s were a time of macho kick-assery, so why not re-invent the wheel here with Arnold Schwarzenegger meets the World Wrestling Federation. Ben is simply a helicopter pilot in this one, and ends up 'playing the game' of sorts for failing to open fire on a hunger strike in the future which seems to be absent a middle class. Instead of undermining the game (as in the novel), Schwartzenegger's muscled gladiator takes the game to a new and entertaining level. Richards wins the respect of the ex-Champ waiting to kill him (amusingly, both actors would go onto being governors of big US states) and instead of blowing up the system, he merely executes the game show host (a brilliantly savage Richard Dawson) in a spectacular fashion in front of the live viewing audience. Survey says? Appointment Television! And another film whose message (insofar as an action film can have a 'message') has aged quite respectably into the 21st century.
"The Odyssey"
Perhaps this one is a bit of a stretch, because who can actually believe the Coen Brothers when they say they were adapting Homer's The Odyssey with neither of them having ever read the famous poem! The similarities and broad strokes are many here - the episodic nature, the various villains and challenges along the way, but unlike Homer, the Coen's made a film almost curiously free of violence (Cow shooting notwithstanding). In fact, O Brother Where Art Thou? re-invents the trials and tribulations of Ulysses as an extreme farce, punctuated with great American music of the 1930s (when the film is set), and occupying itself with the curious politics of the time, some Marx Brothers laced dialogue and a nudge, nudge, wink wink to Preston Sturges. A straight-arrow story becomes a goofy and extremely dense comedy of words with nary a straight path in sight. Not a first for the Coen's who turned noir on its head with The Big Lebowski and walked a strange line of originality, parody and loving homage (with hats, lots of hats) in Miller's Crossing. In spite of its origins, O Borther Where Art Thou? stands on its own two feet, bearing a pleasant aroma of fresh pomade. It's dapper.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
The beast of a thousand versions, even the different film incarnations of Blade Runner contradict each other. Is Deckard a Replicant or does he drive happily into The Shining, er, sunset with his living sex-doll, Rachel? The novella itself is a lesser work of Phillip K. Dick which focuses A LOT on religion where the main character spends time on a type of Virtual Reality inducing tread-mill via a screen, to play the ever climbing messiah making his way uphill only to start over again at the bottom. Perhaps that is what the screenplay writing was like for the film, going through a raft of screen-writers and drafts, and having one of the key moments in the film written on set by the actor. And a policeman with a wife and a partner ended up in the film as an ex-cop with seemingly no history. Which makes sense considering the changes to the beginning, middle and end. Heck, even the phrase, Blade Runner was never used in the novel, rather being 'cool-sounding' during pre-production, giving the title essentially no meaning. Yet questions of morality, existence and essential humanity are still explored, abstractly, in the film version which applied a hard-boiled style not evident at all in the book. An ironic footnote is that Dick claimed that footage of the film was exactly what he had envisioned when he wrote the book. Yet, Ridley Scott, who was notorious for having gotten exactly the visual look he wanted, claimed to have never read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Who exactly is the joke on here? Either way, it all more or less worked out in the end The film has aged in such (all versions, really) that there are a lot of cinema-types out there who cherish extracting any or all of the three DVD versions from "The Briefcase."
Happy April Fools.
